An international team of researchers has created a new map of the Roman Empire, expanding the ancient road network by more than 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers).
Of course, there’s the saying: “All roads lead to Rome.” But while it is true that many of the empire’s major cities were connected to the capital via highways, the secondary roads within that network had not been studied in detail, said Tom Brumans, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of a study describing the roads published in the journal Scientific Data on Thursday (6 November).
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Brughmans and colleagues have created a new digital atlas of Roman roads in Europe, the Near East, and North Africa to better understand interconnections within the Roman Empire around its greatest extent in 150 AD. This is to better understand the interconnections of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent in 150 AD. The Itiner-e platform is open access and contains high-resolution spatial data on Roman roads derived from historical and archaeological information, topographic maps, and remote sensing data, according to the study.
The resulting map contains approximately 186,000 miles (300,000 km) of roads, twice as many as any other map. And this huge road network is a testament to the power of the Roman Empire.
“This massively integrated network has been a historic transformation,” said Blumans. “For the first time, it meant that an epidemic, an economic boom, or a new religion could come ‘onto the continent’ and reshape the world.”
One example Blumans gives is the Antonine Plague, which occurred in 165 AD and devastated the Roman Empire, killing perhaps a quarter of the population.
“Mapping the ancient roads that carried the Antonine Plague provides a 2,000-year-old case study of the impact pandemics have had on society over the centuries,” Bluemans said.
Jeffrey Becker, a Mediterranean archaeologist at Binghamton University in New York who was not involved in the study, said Itiner-e is a useful digital tool to improve experts’ understanding of the Roman world. The authors conducted a thorough review of the data to compile the road dataset, Becker told Live Science via email.
But Becker said there were some gaps in the Itiner-e map, which may be a result of data availability and the difficulty even experts have in recognizing the different types of Roman roads in the archaeological record.
Blumans said the new dataset includes “nearly 200,000 kilometers of secondary roads, but this number could increase significantly.” So Blumans and his colleagues see the new map as a “call to action,” showing other experts where historical gaps remain or where archaeological excavations are needed.
“We know there are many avenues we have yet to discover.”
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