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This superb guide brings the work of Filippo Coarelli, one of the most widely published and well-known scholars of Roman topography, archeology and art, to a broad English-language audience. Conveniently organized by walking tours and illustrated throughout with clear maps, drawings, and plans, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide covers all of the major, and an unparalleled number of minor, ancient sites in the city, and, unlike most other guides of Rome, includes major and many minor sites within easy reach of the city, such as Ostia Antica, Palestrina, Tivoli, and the many areas of interest along the ancient Roman roads. An essential resource for tourists interested in a deeper understanding of Rome's classical remains, it is also the ideal book for students and scholars approaching the ancient history of one of the world's most fascinating cities. • Covers all the major sites including the Capitoline, the Roman Forum, the Imperial Fora, the Palatine Hill, the Valley of the Colosseum, the Esquiline, the Caelian, the Quirinal, and the Campus Martius. • Discusses important clusters of sites-one on the area surrounding Circus Maximus and the other in the vicinity of the Trastevere, including the Aventine and the Vatican. • Covers the history and development of the city walls and aqueducts. • Follows major highways leading outside of the city to important and fascinating sites in the periphery of Rome. • Features 189 maps, drawings, and diagrams, and an appendix on building materials and techniques. • Includes an updated and expanded bibliography for students and scholars of Ancient Rome.

This chapter charts a huge arc of history from the early days of Rome to the end of the Western Roman Empire. One of the most innovative changes at Rome comes with Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which heralds the creation of a new architectural form, the basilica church. The great basilica churches pulled the center of Rome away from the Forum, and this had profound consequences on Roman topography for centuries to come. Historians debate at length some of the immensely technical issues surrounding sixth century, but the general account of the passage from monarchy to annual magistracy around the beginning of the fifth century BCE is probably correct. One of the liveliest debates in ancient history is over the nature of the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire.

Rich evidence from Egypt as a province of the Roman Empire documents a curious story of local public archives being mismanaged over a period of several decades after their creation by the Roman state in the mid-first century CE. The events involved the destruction of records by pests and through a failure to catalogue and index them. Precisely why this happened remains a mystery. Was this a case of subaltern resistance by local elites tasked with maintaining Roman state archives, a targeted aim of which was to generate administrative knowledge about private wealth? Or had local liturgists misunderstood or been overwhelmed by the demands imposed by the Roman imperial administration? This story will be compared with other evidence of the destruction of public records in the Roman Empire, which underscores how invasive Roman record-keeping institutions were perceived to be.

The centuriations were public lands delimited and divided in regular lots by Rome as a result of the conquest but also the conceptual appropriation of new territories, which were transformed according to particular ideas of space. Despite previous works rejecting the astronomical hypothesis for the orientation of Roman centuriations, recent publications have supported the role of particular astronomical phenomena in the design of Roman land and urbanism in Italy. The aim of this work is to determine whether the orientation of the centuriations follows any pattern, and to determine the precepts, if any, underlying the election of privileged directions. We present a statistical study of the orientation of 67 centuriations in Italy—the largest sample of this type ever studied in this region—that considers the conditions of the surrounding environment together with a comparative analysis with a dataset of the same type that includes 52 Italian Roman towns. The results show interesting patterns shared by both centuriations and towns, some of them coinciding with relevant astronomical events in the Roman context, together with others in which differentrequirements would have been prioritized. In summary, we should consider the sky as an element involved in the creation of Roman urban and rural spaces.

Four gold coins minted in the V century have been studied with non-destructive synchrotron radiation techniques, namely X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray Absorption Near Edge Spectroscopy (XANES). XRF data analyzed coupling standard and statistical methods were used to distinguish the composition of the alloy constituting the coins from that of successive deposits processes. Our analysis presents a quantification of the trace elements present in the metallic alloy providing interesting details for historical insight. Furthermore, on the basis of the XRF maps, some regions of interest were selected for XANES at the K-edge of Fe. Our analysis of the Fe spectra points out two main phases which can be related to Fe oxides naturally present in soil. From the relative abundance of these oxides, information on the site where the coins were found can be obtained, providing additional information on their fate across the centuries.

This article examines four Marian histories written by Bohuslav Balbín (1621–88), a Bohemian Jesuit, scholar, and noble, in the second half of the seventeenth century. Assessing the content and form of these works, it argues that Balbín reinterpreted and intellectualized the genre of Marian hagiotopography, expanding the historical sections of his works and conceiving of hagiotopography as historical scholarship. Balbín's unique approach to this genre and his focus on Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian history allowed him to present his particular vision of the Bohemian composite monarchy, which was influenced by his status as a Jesuit and by his patriotism. Balbín's representation of the inherent unity of the territories which made up the composite state criticized Habsburg policy during and following the Thirty Years’ War. In this way, the article sheds light on the interplay between Catholicism, patriotism, and scholarship in early modern Europe.

This paper presents a unique case of the application of remote sensing methods in archaeological survey devoted to ancient pre-Roman Imperial roads in the Southern Levant. The results of our preparatory remote sensing research and subsequent fieldwork in Jordan and Israel between 22 February and 23 March 2023, within the framework of the research project entitled “Travel and Mobility in Hellenistic and Early Roman Palestine”, are reported and discussed. Part of this project is a large-scale, systematic research attempt to discover additional ancient pre-Roman roads and to suggest a working methodology for future research. The methodology is supposed to combine remote sensing research and archaeological survey. The project’s first fieldwork achieved several goals. First, the modern methods enabled us to provide a high-resolution capture of the detected features and artifacts, including the courses of ancient roads and the locations of road-related archaeological sites. Altogether, 105 road remains, 62 archaeological sites, and 14 pottery findings were identified; what is more, 11 GPS (Global Positioning System) tracks of ancient roads were registered. Second, we suggested necessary revisions to the previous state of research and reported new findings. For instance, newly discovered rock art evidence found along Glueck’s Road confirms the continuity of the use of this road long into late antiquity and early Islam. Third, some methodological conclusions were reached. For example, a multi-source approach to identifying ancient roads including the use of archival cartographic sources, archival and modern satellite and aerial imagery, and the databases of archaeological sites is still necessary. However, there can be no doubt that spatial analyses and remote sensing studies must be accompanied by archaeological fieldwork, which is absolutely necessary for determining the dating of the roads (by dating the settlement and pottery) and a detailed identification of the road courses (particularly through the discovery of road-related infrastructure).

The residential architecture of Alexandria has traditionally been extrapolated based on comparison with the plans and decoration of monumental hypogea from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. New evidence from an archaeological research programme launched at Kom el-Dikka offers novel insights into the style of domestic architecture and the urban topography of the city.

Large parts of the urban layout of the abandoned Roman town of Bassianae (in present-day Serbia) are still discernible on the surface today due to the deliberate and targeted quarrying of the Roman foundations. In 2014, all of the town’s intramural (and some extramural) areas were surveyed using aerial photography, ground-penetrating radar, and magnetometry to analyze the site’s topography and to map remaining buried structures. The surveys showed a strong agreement between the digital surface model derived from the aerial photographs and the geophysical prospection data. However, many structures could only be detected by one method, underlining the benefits of a complementary archaeological prospection approach using multiple methods. This article presents the results of the extensive surveys and their comprehensive integrative interpretation, discussing Bassianae’s ground plan and urban infrastructure. Starting with an overview of this Roman town’s research history, we present the details of the triple prospection approach, followed by the processing, integrative analysis, and interpretation of the acquired data sets. Finally, this newly gained information is contrasted with a plan of Roman Bassianae compiled in 1935.

The Roman Empire’s road system was critical for structuring the movement of people, goods and ideas, and sustaining imperial control. Yet, it remains incompletely mapped and poorly integrated across sources despite centuries of research. We present Itiner-e, the most detailed and comprehensive open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire. It was created by identifying roads from archaeological and historical sources, locating them using modern and historical topographic maps and remote sensing, and digitising them with road segment-level metadata and certainty categories. 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% are known with certainty. This resource is transformative for understanding how mobility shaped connectivity, administration, and even disease transmission in the ancient world, and for studies of the millennia-long development of terrestrial mobility in the region.