Maneuverability of roman river warships / Fahrteigenschaften roemischer Flussgaleeren

There are other things out there than just astrophysics. Here I present a project where I and another astrophysicist collaborate with Prof. Schäfer (Department of History, Universität Hamburg 2005-2008; Department of History, Universität Trier 2008-present). As it turns out, data analysis skill that we take for granted in astrophysics (starting from reading a table of numbers from a text file, descriptive statics of datasets, calibration of measurements, plots) are outside of the level of experience for almost all students and researchers in some other subjects. Thus, we started a collaboration between historians and data-analysis oriented astrophysicists. Much of this work was done while I was a Poct-Doc at CfA, thus the data is deposited in this dataverse.

In this project we aim to obtain reliable numerical characteristics of Roman warships. Antique texts have revealed a large number of facts about the fleet the Roman empire possessed in the first centuries of the first millennium, but measured and proven numbers e.g. on the speed of these vessels are mostly unknown.