Ancient Rome’s Roads Might Have Been Almost Twice as Long as Researchers Previously Thought
A new digital atlas is the most comprehensive account of the Roman Empire’s terrestrial roads to date
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Key takeaways: A new map for Ancient Rome
- The research team behind a new digital atlas designed to address the “gap in resources for studying the ancient world” has found that Ancient Roman roads were much more expansive than earlier mapping suggested.
- In the new study, the researchers write, “The dataset nearly doubles the known length of Roman roads through increased coverage and spatial precision, and reveals that the location of only 2.737 percent are known with certainty.”
All roads lead to Rome, they say. A new digital map of the Roman Empire finds that its roads covered a lot more ground than previously thought.
At its peak in the second century C.E., the Roman Empire encompassed a huge swath of land spanning from modern-day Western Europe to North Africa and parts of Asia. Itiner-e, the recently published digital atlas, aims to be the most comprehensive dataset of the roads that connected that vast empire, along which Romans carried messages, transported goods and staged military campaigns.
“This dataset brings together a huge range of research to give a bigger and more comprehensive picture of the Roman road network than we’ve had before,” Catherine Fletcher, a historian who wrote a book about Rome’s imperial expansion and was not involved in the recent study, tells CNN’s Taylor Nicioli.
“It also shows just how much we still don’t know about the roads, despite their fame,” she adds.
Itiner-e was produced by a team of archaeologists who based their work on historical and archaeological sources, topographic maps and remote sensing data, which includes satellite imagery and aerial photography. Their resulting map reflects every terrestrial road believed to have been in existence during the Roman Empire’s peak, around 150 C.E. Their findings are outlined in Scientific Data, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal in the Nature Portfolio, and the digital map is viewable online.
All together, the map includes around 186,000 miles of road—much more than the miles calculated by previous sources like the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations, which launched in 2007.
One reason for the increase is that, using modern technology and investigation techniques, researchers were able to identify roads that were previously unaccounted for. Prior work had focused on major thoroughfares known as the “highways of the Roman Empire,” says Tom Brughmans, an archaeologist and co-author of the study, to the Associated Press’ Christina Larson. In making Itiner-e, researchers dug into “secondary roads,” paths that were used less and therefore understudied.
Another reason for the dramatic increase in road length is that the researchers adapted routes to geographic realities. “To cross a mountain, our roads follow a winding pass rather than a direct line,” which increased the total length, they wrote in the study.
The “Google Maps for Roman roads,” as some researchers have dubbed the new map, per Artnet’s Alina Cohen, is a major expansion of previous digital mapping of the Roman Empire. It also has some caveats.
Each road is tagged with the researchers’ degree of certainty about its location as either certain, conjectured or hypothetical. Only 2.7 percent of the roads are marked as certain, with the vast majority marked as conjectured. “This shows a discrepancy between our knowledge of the existence and location of Roman roads: We know all of the included roads were used at some point during the Roman period, but their precise locations are not certain,” the researchers wrote. It’s also unclear exactly when each road was active.
Even so, as archaeologist Benjamin Ducke at the German Archaeological Institute, who was not involved in the study, tells the Associated Press, this new map “will be a very foundational work for a lot of other research.”