A Study of Lead Ingot Cargoes from Ancient Mediterranean Shipwrecks

Lead is often relegated to a footnote or sidebar in the study of ancient metals. However, the hundreds of lead ingots discovered in underwater sites over the past half-century have attested to the widespread production and trade of this utilitarian metal. Shipwreck sites allow independent dating evidence not available for many land find. They also provide information about shipment size as well as accompanying cargo which can offer clues about trade patterns and markets for lead in the ancient world. While lead was not particularly rare nor valuable, it represents small- to moderate-scale trade that bridges the gap between luxury trade and the circulation of staple agricultural products. It thus can be viewed as a proxy for the many other perishable materials that supported daily life, such as timber, cloth, cordage, leather and pigments.

Due to the abundance of lead ingot finds, published in many different languages with great variation in the details provided, it is difficult to compare all of this material. This thesis, therefore, compiles and presents data on all published lead ingots from Mediterranean and Atlantic shipwrecks through the fourth century C.E., in order to provide a framework to analyze the ancient seaborne lead trade. Sixty-eight sites containing lead ingots, lead ore or lead minerals are included in the analysis, divided into six time periods: Bronze Age, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman Republic and Roman Empire. A typology of ingots has been developed to allow for comparison of ingots between wrecks. The uses of lead are reviewed, organized by type of use: domestic, professional, military and infrastructural. This allows insight into both the consumers in need of lead and the volume and regularity of consumption required for each use. An overview of lead production and its economic limitations further informs the discussion of the lead trade. The final analysis considers all of these factors in creating a picture of lead trade for each of the six periods, focusing on the regions of supply, the types of demand, and the dominant forces that drove the mining and production of lead.