Caesarea Maritima sits on the open Mediterranean coast halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, on a stretch of shoreline with no natural harbor. Herod the Great built the city from the seabed up between 22 and 10 BC, naming it for his patron Augustus and pioneering large-scale underwater concrete construction with hydraulic pulvis Puteolanus — volcanic ash imported from the Bay of Naples that hardens in seawater. The result was the largest artificial harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, an administrative capital that replaced Jerusalem as the seat of Roman governance for Judea, and the city where every Roman procurator from Coponius to Florus held official residence. Avraham Negev led early excavations in the 1960s; Robert Bull directed the Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima from 1971 to 1990; the Combined Caesarea Expeditions under Kenneth Holum and Avner Raban have continued from 1989 with substantial underwater work on the harbor moles. Three New Testament episodes are anchored at this site. In Acts 10, Cornelius — "a centurion of the Italian Cohort" stationed at Caesarea — receives Peter and becomes the first uncircumcised Gentile baptized into the Christian church. In Acts 23–26, Paul is brought under heavy guard from Jerusalem and held in Herod's praetorium for two years, tried before successive procurators Felix and Festus, and finally before Herod Agrippa II. The Herodian harbor, the hippodrome, the theater, and the promontory palace later used as the praetorium have all been excavated. In 1961, the Italian expedition under Antonio Frova recovered a reused limestone block in the theater bearing a four-line Latin dedication naming Pontius Pilatus, Praefectus Iudaeae — the only inscription naming Pilate ever found, and the only contemporary epigraphic confirmation of his title. Caesarea is an Israel National Park; the Pilate Stone is on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Kenneth Holum et al, Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective After Two Millennia (Brill, 1996); Avner Raban and Kenneth Holum, Caesarea Papers 2 (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 35, 1999); Antonio Frova, "L'iscrizione di Ponzio Pilato a Cesarea" (Rendiconti dell'Istituto Lombardo 95, 1961); Acts 10; Acts 23–26.
Caesarea Maritima anchors three distinct New Testament narratives to excavated, datable stratigraphy while supplying the only contemporary inscription confirming Pontius Pilate's title and office. The site thus provides rare convergence between literary, epigraphic, and architectural evidence for Roman administrative and early Christian history in first-century AD Judea.