Reconstructing Roman Road Network for the understanding of Urban development

Project Information

R3NUrb

Grant agreement ID: 101109605

DOI

10.3030/101109605

Project closed

EC signature date 3 May 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 November 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 165 312,96

Coordinated by

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - R3NUrb (Reconstructing Roman Road Network for the understanding of Urban development)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Roman conquest, occupation, and dominion over a large part of current Europe and beyond marked a strong change in social, cultural, and economic patterns in the area. Two of the most important and lasting changes were the establishment of a new transport network and the large-scale development of cities. Connectivity continues to
be an essential factor in the analysis of the spread of urbanisation, migration, the ancient economy, and the transmission of ideas. To date, no analysis of communication, trade, distribution of people and resources, or the economy in general, exists that actively considers the transport network, the single element that made connectivity possible, on an Empire-wide scale and therefore no attempts have been made to understand its influence on urbanism or its long-term influence. The R3NUrb project is placed in this context.

The R3NUrb is placed within this context and seeks to model the relationship between connectivity and urbanism in the Roman world through three primary objectives:

1 reconstruct the Roman Transport system
2 understand the success and distribution of Roman urban centres in relation to the reconstructed transport system.
3 understanding the relationship between urban hierarchy and the transport network.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

A raster based methodology for automatedly constructing transport corridors across the entire Roman Empire was adopted, and implemented. This eventually broadened to include not only the terrestrial transport network but also the maritime, representing an enormous and multimodal approach to mobility and connectivity. The terrestrial cost surface uses seasonal and multifactor costs to better model movement. These include, temperature, altitude, loose sand, water attraction and snow cover, as well as the core cost of movement under foot at certain slope. The maritime model expands on this, utlising multifactor such as wind, uncertainty and risk, and models detailed movement across the entire Mediterranean, Atlantic cost of Europe and the Red and Black Seas.

The raster based corridor approach is vectorised into a broad costed network remotely. This offers very dynamic and detailed costs for movement across the entire Empire under different conditions and modes of trasnport.

A database of sites was created to test and model urbanism against connectivity and mobility. Each of the 1,530 urban sites have “connectivity” values for different seasons which could be used to establish patterns of mobility across the Empire. This work emphatically shows that the urban centers lie in areas of high potential mobility. While the seasons drastically change the overall picture, this core conclusion remains true for all conditions modelled.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This approach represents a remote model for reconstructing costed networks of mobility and connectivity. The methodology is not limited to the Roman Empire, and is widely applicable. The network produced for the Roman Empire is the most complete and detailed to date, and able to be constructed entirely remotely. The benefit here is not only in creating a network with little archaeological data, but to completing existing networks based on archaeological data, that, by their nature, are incomplete due to the incomplete nature of archaeological data. As such, this methodology can be used to remotely construct costed networks from scratch as well as complete existing reconstructions.

The approach to cost surfaces is entirely novel and shows statistically the importance of considering multiple cost factors beyond the reliance on slope and topography, Additionally, the use of temporally dynamic terrestrial cost surfaces is very innovative and shows again, the importance of considering temporal changes in cost for land based mobility, something that is rarely given much thought.

The quantitative approach to urbanism clearly demonstrates, on a continental scale, that their is a statistical relationship between potential mobility and urbanism. This is something that had previously been assumed by some, but not something that had been proved at this scale in such a definitive manner.