SORS: Trampled Under Foot скачать в хорошем качестве

SORS: Trampled Under Foot

Trampled Under Foot: New Quantitative Approaches for Understanding the Seasonal Urban Transport Network of the Roman Empire Abstract: Movement and mobility are key to human development and to our understanding of past human interactions. Mobility, particularly on a large continental scale, facilitated trade, cultural co-evolution, dispersion and migration and the diffusion of technologies and social developments such as urbanism. However, direct evidence for movement is rare and difficult to interpret. As such, determining the exact way past societies were connected often requires proxies and/or novel approaches to understanding the routes and costs associated with traversing them. This paper develops a novel cost corridor methodology and applies it to the Roman Empire, utilising it to generate a landscape of mobility across the entire Empire with which urban sites are then quantitatively compared in terms of their potential mobility. The costs used are dynamic and temporal, allowing for seasonal changes in mobility to be understood. Testing the outputs against reconstructed road networks we see a correlation, indicating this methodologies utility as a potential tool for remotely detecting areas for deeper investigation. Additionally, we show a strong relationship between potential mobility and urban distribution, with the hierarchical differences within the urban network being more complex to understand. Ultimately this paper outlines the exciting potential of this novel methodology for better understanding the landscape of movement across the Roman Empire.