Roman road builders
-
They were busy bees.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London and other European institutions analyzed a data set representing almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.
Testing an imperial network
The study, published in Nature Communications on Sept. 15, challenges the idea that roads of the empire were uniformly straight and the famous saying that "all roads lead to Rome." The analysis draws on "Itiner-e, The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads" and applies network centrality, a method for measuring how important a given point is to overall connectivity, to model the empire's road system.
-
It says a lot about the vastness of the Roman Empire that we are still doing this work. After two thousand years (give or take), and after centuries of archaeologists working on ancient Rome, we didn't already have a sense of their roads and how the network of them was structured?
-
I saw an historian's video the other saying it's a myth that the Romans didn't cross Hadrian's Wall. If his scholarship is reviewed, legitimate, etc., some did cross over, married Scottish women, etc.
To be clear, he also said incursions were made, settlements were held, etc.
I'm looking into this but I believe these events would have been inevitable.
-
@mary-anna How often I miss Muffin's sister's posts, and how often I wished Muffin was still posting.
Hope your kids are well.

-
@mary-anna
Seems it's a review of everything we've found so far. In the UK many of our modern roads are on or follow the roman roads, or drovers roads. We live within 100 yards of one that is partly under tarmac(and was excavated by archaeologists), then continues as a farmers muddy track.
@Daniel
Yes the Romans were in Scotland


Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login