Punic and Roman Ancient Warfare of the Naval Battle of Egadi

forthcoming

PRAWN proposes to conduct the first extensive archaeological and archaeometric investigation of metal defensive armour discovered at the underwater site of the Battle of Egadi, Sicily, Italy (241 BCE). As the final confrontation between Rome and Carthage during the First Punic war (264-241 BCE), the Battle of Egadi played a pivotal role in Mediterranean history, enabling Roman expansion through the central-western Mediterranean by defeating the Punic Empire’s hegemony in Sicily. By applying an integrated, interdisciplinary and multivariate methodology to the recovered artifacts from the submersed site, PRAWN aims to: 1. Develop a comprehensive understanding of the panoplies of the naval warriors involved in the First Punic War (e.g. Roman, Punic, Iberian, Numidian, Gallic, Balearic, Hellenistic, etc.) in terms of typologies, manufacturing, provenance of primary materials and use. 2. Identify metallurgical production groups and gather unprecedented information on copper metallurgy in the central-western Mediterranean during the 1st millennium BCE, including the poorly documented Punic metalworking crafts. 3. Elaborate new tools and protocols for cross-referencing archaeometallurgical results, focusing on samples’ representativity in Heritage Science, in terms of alloy chemical composition and microstructure, and create the first FAIR database on body armour from the Mediterranean western area during the Iron Age, starting with PRAWN’s results.