Roman Urbanism Research Papers

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https://www.kent.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/99304/The-Roman-Period-Chapter.pdf

The archaeological settlement category of roman Insulae stays in the focus of this international colloquium organized by the Vindonissa-professorship of the University Basel and Augusta Raurica. This group of urban living and trading... more

PORTUGUÊS Uma das maiores dificuldades com que qualquer centro urbano, de maior ou menor escala, se depara é sem dúvida a da manutenção das condições de salubridade. No que ao Período Romano se refere, esta preocupação está bem patente... more

PORTUGUÊS

Uma das maiores dificuldades com que qualquer centro urbano, de maior ou menor escala, se depara é sem dúvida a da manutenção das condições de salubridade. No que ao Período Romano se refere, esta preocupação está bem patente nas cidades fundadas por todo o espaço romano, sob a forma de complexos sistemas de escoamento projectados com a própria cidade.
Se, por um lado conhecemos relativamente bem as estratégias adoptadas nos centros urbanos de maiores dimensões, muitos deles projectados ex nihil ou reformulados em larga escala aquando da sua passagem para a esfera romana, por outro desconhecemos em que medida estas soluções seriam aplicadas a centros urbanos de média e pequena dimensão, muitos deles herdeiros de localizações e condicionantes urbanísticas pré-romanas.
No caso de Mirobriga, cuja ocupação remonta, pelo menos, ao século IX ou VIII a.C., a construção do forum, na segunda metade do século I d.C., anulou grande parte daquele que seria o urbanismo indígena, ocupando a grande maioria do planalto e relegando a construção da restante cidade para o terreno em seu redor. No entanto, a topografia do terreno circundante, caracterizada por uma série de vales e colinas, não facilitava a criação de uma malha urbana ortogonal, pelo que o traçado das diversas vias e a configuração das insulae se pautou por um desenho quasi orgânico, podendo alguns dos eixos viários corresponder a antigos acessos ao povoado indígena.
Se a preocupação com a limpeza pessoal estava já atestada pela existência de dois edifícios termais, ambos dotados de latrinas, a presente dissertação permitiu compreender mais fundo de que forma a topografia condicionou a gestão dos chamados resíduos líquidos na cidade, procurando caracterizar os diversos resíduos produzidos e as soluções adoptadas para a sua mitigação, bem como a forma como os diversos edifícios se adaptaram às dificuldades do terreno e às solicitações decorridas da pluviosidade, revelando preocupações não só ao nível da estabilidade dos mesmos mas também ao nível da salubridade do seu interior.

ENGLISH

One of the greatest challenges any urban settlement, whatever its size, faces is that of keeping certain health standards. In Roman times, this concern is attested in cities founded all over the empire in the form of complex sewage systems designed with the cities themselves.
However, if the systems within cities founded and created ex nihil or largely rebuilt upon their annexation to the roman territory are relatively well know, such is not the case of those found in medium and small sized cities, many of them ancient indegeneos Iron Age settlements that offered several sorts of orographic and urbanistic constraints.
Altought in the site of Mirobriga, in modern day Portugal, whose occupation dates back to, at least, the 9th or 8th century BC, the construction of the roman forum, in the second half of the 1st century AD, destroyed most of the original settlement, occupying almost the intire hill and forcing the settlement itself to move to the surrounding grounds, the overall terrain did not favour the creation of an orthogonal urban grid. This resulted in an organic design of paths, some probably adapting previously existent routes, and insulae that embraced and adapted to the terrain.
The need and care for some sort of personal cleanliness and maintenance in this ancient city had alreay been hinted through the existence of two bath buildings, both with their own latrines. However, the analysis of the several extant buildings has permited us not only to grasp what sort of waste was produced within the city and how the terrain influenced the way waste, in particular, rain water and fluid residues, was perceived and managed, but also the way the topography and rain water took a toll on the structural stability and overall salubrity of the buildings themselves and the way the were designed.

Ancient Roman commercial landscapes provide a rich source of inspiration for the transformation of brick-and-mortar retail from a space for goods to a place for socially rich experiences in response to an increasing shift today toward... more

Ancient Roman commercial landscapes provide a rich source of inspiration for the transformation of brick-and-mortar retail from a space for goods to a place for socially rich experiences in response to an increasing shift today toward online buying. Unfortunately, despite the ubiquity of shops in Rome’s urban centers (e.g. 500+ at Pompeii alone), only a handful of publications exist on ancient retail. This oversight is partially due to a primitivist economic model, dominant in the second half of the 20th century, which assumed that the Roman economy lacked a sophisticated consumer market capable of supporting a highly specialized retail trade (e.g. Finley 1999). Many marketing historians likewise still insist that retail trades before 1850 did not exhibit key elements associated with retailing in a modern, industrialized society (e.g. shop economies, marketing strategies, shopping behavior; Mathias 1967). These traditional assumptions have been challenged, and more recent scholarship has begun to focus on the visibility of ancient Roman retail, establishing the shop as a significant component of urban economies (e.g. Holleran 2012, Ellis 2018). The Roman shop, however, was more than a unit in the distributive system or a passive architectural shell in which buying and selling simply happened; it was a setting for experiences and an active agent in fostering sociability and forging social identities. Nonetheless, a detailed study of dynamic buyer-seller interactions within the shop environment, the primary context for the negotiation and performance of consumer identities (e.g. Campbell 2004, Miller et al. 1998), is missing from the discussion. This poster will display the preliminary results of a project addressing this lacuna by leveraging cutting-edge VR technology to explore how commercial space impacted buyer behavior and reflected marketing strategies in ancient Rome. The project’s multidisciplinary approach incorporates archaeological theory, phenomenology, environmental psychology, game design, marketing theory, consumer culture theory, and classical studies.

In spring 2019, the project is building an interactive 3D model of a Pompeian shop in the Unity 3D game engine for application on desktop and in VR (e.g. Oculus Go, Quest) (Fig. 1). A core principle of game design is meaningful choice (Gee 2013; Salen and Zimmerman 2004), which empowers the player by giving them the sense that their behavior significantly impacts the game world. Meaningful choice drives player engagement, but it clearly has a comparative relation to consumer behavior. The model will be used to address the question of how Romans shopped in shops by tracking player reactions (e.g. movement patterns) to environmental variables (e.g. layout and furnishing) to understand how shop design facilitated and/or restricted movement into and around the shop space, shaping social interactions. The hypothesis is that placement of a shop counter at the entrance to many Pompeian shops restricted physical access to the interior, forcing commercial transactions to occur in the street where the consumer was on public display. The model will also track gaze paths to investigate how shop décor (polychromatic marbles, painted fresco, religious shrines, etc.) impacted the visual attention of the buyer. Archaeological evidence indicates that the façades of shops at Pompeii were more ornate than their interiors, suggesting that the shopfront reflects conscious marketing strategies for attracting potential buyers on the street.

Pompeii’s commercial landscape is remarkably well preserved and will form the basis for this study (Fig. 2). The existing shop remains can be reconstructed using photogrammetry and 3D modeling software while photographs and drawings from old excavation volumes (e.g. Spinazzola 1953) and online databases (e.g. pompeiiinpictures.com) preserve now faded shop décor (Fig. 3). While it is impossible to reconstruct a Pompeian shop with 100% accuracy, by capitalizing on methodologies already in use in marketing research (e.g. Burke 2018), 3D visualization technology offers an innovative, indirect way to approach questions of ancient consumer experience and behavior that is grounded in ancient evidence.

By emphasizing aspects of continuity and innovation in ancient retail trades, this work contributes to a broader synthesis of retail history. Roman shops can offer new-old ways of thinking about marketing strategies, the evolution of consumer behavior, and retail design. In particular, the project’s novel approach to viewing ancient shops as loci of sociability where cultural meaning and identities were actively produced and publicly displayed offers a fresh understanding of the social value of shops to urban life in ancient Rome, highlighting in turn the important role shops designed as gathering places for social encounters have in maintaining the vitality and civic community of our own urban centers.

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- by Rhodora G Vennarucci and +1
  William Loder
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- 9
  Pompeii (Archaeology), Ancient economy, Roman Retail, Roman Urbanism

This contribution draws together a corpus of c.100 gaming boards from Roman Britain cataloged by type. The data show that three types of games were played in Britain during the Roman period with a heavy emphasis on game playing among... more

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- by Tim Penn and +1
  Summer Courts
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- 9
  Roman Britain, Roman military archaeology, Roman Army, Hadrian's Wall (Archaeology)

A dissertação que se publica incide na actividade arqueológica desenvolvida, desde a década de 1930, no Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, local outrora ocupado pelo fórum de Aeminium e paço episcopal de Coimbra. Do conjunto destas... more

A dissertação que se publica incide na actividade arqueológica desenvolvida, desde a década de 1930, no Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, local outrora ocupado pelo fórum de Aeminium e paço episcopal de Coimbra.
Do conjunto destas campanhas arqueológicas, particularmente das mais recentes, resultou um manancial informativo singular, assente num extenso repertório de registo estratigráfico (a carecer de revisão) e no volume do espólio recolhido (na generalidade por estudar). Este trabalho surge, assim, em resposta às lacunas de investigação sentidas, sobretudo ao nível da cultura material e da ausência de um estudo de síntese da história do monumento. Um trabalho que, combinando o universo dos dados arqueológicos reunidos ao longo das diversas intervenções, revê e amplia o conhecimento acerca da transformação orgânica deste conjunto patrimonial, desde a instalação do fórum romano de Aeminium até ao paço episcopal de finais do século XVI.
A fusão de distintas plataformas de análise, que se convencionou designar como ensaio de arqueologia urbana, permitiu esclarecer questões suscitadas pelo edifício e sustentar as propostas de reconstituição arquitectónicas já apresentadas.
Mais uma vez se conclui que este documento histórico, vivo e vivido ininterruptamente durante os últimos dois milénios e onde o passado se encontra presente através dos seus volumes sobrepostos, apesar de feito, desfeito e refeito ao longo deste arco cronológico, nunca deixou de se acomodar à sua raiz primordial – o criptopórtico de Aeminium.

This dissertation focuses on the archaeological activity carried out since the 1930s at the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, the former location of the forum of Aeminium and the episcopal palace of Coimbra. All these archaeological interventions, particularly the most recent ones, resulted in a unique wealth of information, based on an extensive repertoire of stratigraphic records (which need to be revised) and on the sheer volume of (generally unstudied) recovered materials. This study therefore addresses some research gaps, particularly concerning material culture, and the absence of a synthesis study of the monument’s history. Thus, the study combines the universe of archaeological data gathered throughout the various interventions in order to review and extend our knowledge of the structural transformation of this heritage complex, from the original Roman forum of Aeminium to the late 16th century episcopal palace. The fusion of different platforms of analysis, which was conventionally designated as an urban archaeology essay, enabled the clarification of issues concerning the building and supports the architectural reconstitution proposals already presented. The conclusion is, once again, that this historical document, alive and lived continuously during the last two millennia and where the past is present through its overlapping volumes, despite having been made, unmade and remade throughout this chronological frame, has never ceased to accommodate to its primordial root the cryptoportico of Aeminium.

1. In our paper we present the results of a survey we conducted in November 2018 on two sites in South Jordan: Dajaniya (Ma’an-Husseiniyeh) and Tuwaneh (Tafila-Hesa). Dajaniya is a Roman-Byzantine fortress located ca. 30 km North-East... more

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Les fontaines monumentales constituaient des marqueurs essentiels du paysage urbain de l’Antiquité. Dans les villes du Maghreb romain et tardo-antique, elles occupaient une place privilégiée que leur accordaient peu d’autres régions de... more

Much has been written about gentrification in the contemporary world, but far less work has interrogated whether a similar type of renewal can be observed in different places or periods. This article explores the archaeological... more

La campaña de este año ha consistido en una intervención no agresiva orientada a la resolución de algunos de los problemas histórico arqueológicos planteados por las intervenciones realizadas entre los años 2005 y 2010 que han permitido... more

The marble-clad surfaces of bars (so-called thermopolia) of Pompeii and Herculaneum are a vast and hitherto untapped source of information about marble use by those low on the economic ladder and about reuse of a precious resource. Four... more

The practice of recycling also closely relates to the fate of cities during Late Antiquity, which has been the topic of important debate Spolia was used in all types of monuments, including new building types like churches and city walls.... more

Roman Urbanism

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