The data set is almost double the known length of roads used during Roman times. Photo: Itiner-e, Artas Media, MINERVA
A high-resolution digital map allows people to plan their routes along the ancient roads of the Roman Empire. By combining historical records with modern cartographic techniques, researchers have mapped hundreds of thousands of kilometers of roads. The finds are almost twice the known length of Roman roads.
The dataset was published in Scientific data November 6, along with an online platform called This is the routewhich study co-author Tom Brugmans calls “Google Maps for Roman roads.”1.
“This is a growing resource for the community to continue to add information to ensure that this remains the best representation of our knowledge of where all the roads were in the Roman Empire,” says Brugmans, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Brugmans hopes the dataset will “revolutionize our understanding of how people, ideas and infectious diseases” spread 2000 years ago.. “Information like this can be used to better understand the problems we face today,” he adds.
Source: itiner-e.org
Roman Google Maps
Previous attempts to map road networks of the Roman Empire resulted in incomplete data sets with low spatial resolution and estimates of road locations rather than evidence-based reconstructions.
“Although roads are one of the best-known aspects of Roman history, it is surprising how many details we still don't know about them,” says Catherine Fletcher, a historian at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.
The researchers first identified Roman roads based on previous research, including atlases, surveys, historical sources, archaeological sources and existing milestones. They then compared this information with modern and historical aerial photographs, topographic maps and satellite images. The team digitized each road section at high spatial resolution and then combined these sections into This is the route.
The map includes almost 300,000 kilometers of roads, existing approximately announcement 150, when the empire reached its maximum territorial size.
Higher spatial analysis allowed the researchers to map 200,000 kilometers of secondary roads. By combining different sources, the researchers were able to more accurately map winding roads that traverse complex terrain, improving on previous estimates based on unrealistic straight lines running through mountain passes, for example.
The dataset also shows that the exact location of only 3% of Roman roads is known. Another 7% are considered hypothetical because they have been identified but not precisely discovered or verified across various sources. The remaining roads are speculation and based on fewer documented sources.
“It was a huge surprise and a sobering realization,” says Brugmans. But “that 3% confidence figure is not a failure; it is a “call to action” that gives us an accurate map of certainty about what we don’t know and where to look next.”
