Nicholas Bartos

I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor (Full-Time Appointment), having joined the Department of Classics at UCLA in 2024. I completed my PhD in Classics at Stanford University (2024) and previously received an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Oxford (St. John’s College, 2015) and a BA in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University (2013).

My research principally focuses on how maritime connections structured socioeconomic life in the Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean during the Roman period. Through ongoing archaeological fieldwork in Egypt, Italy, and India both on land and underwater, I analyze the material signatures of maritime activity to address questions about the formation of multicultural seaside communities, the development of the ancient economy, and the long-term trajectories of social history.

My current book project uses computational sailing models, port assemblages, and ancient texts such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei to trace the evolution of commercial relationships in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea between the Roman annexation of Egypt (30 BCE) and the Arab Conquest (639 CE). As part of this research, I am a ceramicist at the Berenike Project on the Egyptian Red Sea and have studied material at several sites along the coast of western India.

In the Mediterranean, I have worked in southeastern Sicily for the past ten years, first on the excavations of the Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” and currently as field director for underwater survey at the ports of Vendicari, Marzamemi, and Portopalo di Capo Passero with the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project.

Other ongoing work centers on the colonial legacies of the ancient Indian Ocean, interactions between indigenous nomadic groups and others in the Eastern Desert of Roman Egypt, Greco-Roman cultic practice and ritual in cosmopolitan port sites, and methodologies for maritime survey and modeling ancient mobility.

I am delighted to teach a range of courses at UCLA on the archaeology and history of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean and beyond, including “Edge of Empires: Transcultural Encounters on the Ancient Indian Ocean,” “Ancient Athletics,” and “Roman Legacies in India.”

Click here for a curriculum vitae and select publications.