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Survey Archaeology in the Roman World

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

A considerable feature of Roman civilization was the creation and support of a dense network of urban settlements. In this respect the case of Italy is even more remarkable if one considers that – besides the presence of a megalopolis like Rome (with its one million inhabitants) – there existed about 430 urban centers scattered all over the peninsula. The thousands of cities and towns of the Roman Empire were connected and supplied by a much-celebrated and highly effective infrastructure made up of ports, roads, and aqueducts. More crucially, each urban polity possessed a well-defined territory (ager): it was (in part) laid out as a regular grid network of squared cadastral plots (centuriatio), and it was specifically meant to provide the inhabitants with most of the resources they needed (e.g., foodstuffs, raw materials). Preindustrial urban populations always required a comparatively higher rural counterpart to support them, and in this regard, the highly urbanized...

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Alessandro Launaro

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  1. Alessandro Launaro
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Correspondence to Alessandro Launaro .

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  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Launaro, A. (2014). Survey Archaeology in the Roman World. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1480

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1480

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