New network of Roman roads discovered in England

2023-08-09 11:58:34

The entire network of Roman roads – UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

MADRID, 9 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –

A network of Roman roads has been discovered in England traversed Devon and Cornwall and it connected important settlements with military forts in the two counties, as well as in Britannia.

Archaeologists from the University of Exeter have used laser scans collected as part of the British Environment Agency’s National LiDAR Program to identify new roadway sections west of the previously known boundary.

Using sophisticated geographic modeling techniques, which incorporate information about gradients and flood risk, the researchers were able to map the full extent of the network and begin to understand why it exists.

Among the things it reveals is that, far from Exeter being the main hub of the network, it was North Tawton that held strategically vital connections to the tidal estuaries north and south of Bodmin and Dartmoor.

These findings are published in Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology.

The research was led by Dr Christopher Smart and Dr João Fonte, specialists in Roman Empire landscape and heritage archaeology, at Exeter’s Department of Archeology and History. Dr. César Parcero Oubiña, from the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the CSIC (Higher Council for Scientific Research), a specialist in geospatial technologies applied to archaeology, led the modeling of the Roman road network.

“Despite more than 70 years of scholarship, published maps of the Roman road network in southern Britain have remained largely unchanged and they are all consistent in showing that to the west of Exeter, Roman Isca, there was little solid evidence of a long-distance road system,” said it’s a statement Dr Smart. “But the recent availability of continuous LiDAR coverage for Great Britain has provided the means to transform our understanding of the Roman road network that developed within the province, and nowhere more than in the far south-west counties, in the territory of the Dumnonii”.

The National LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) Program was conducted between 2016 and 2022 by the Environment Agency covering the whole of England, and the data was made available via the DEFRA Data Services Platform.

The Exeter team, working with public volunteers and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of the Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, studied the scans and together they were able to map around 100 km of additional roadways.

Although this represented a significant advance, the overall picture remained fragmented and patchy, with large portions of the map showing no evidence of Roman roads. Therefore, the team developed a predictive model of the geographic information system, which could intelligently fill in the gaps as to the probable layout of the network.

Using an approach based on least-cost routes, optimal connections between two or more points, and other methods, such as focal mobility networks and transit corridors, the team began mapping primary and secondary “nodes” in the two counties. These included permanent military fortifications, including the known forts of Old Burrow and The Beacon on Martinhoe, as well as settlements at Exeter and North Tawton. They then calculated the easiest routes between these points. And when the team went back to the LiDAR scans, they were able to identify another 13 km of Roman road within a short distance predicted by the model.

In the final stage, the researchers used focal mobility networks and transit corridors to extend the road network to areas beyond the main known Roman sites in the region, suggesting some alternative secondary or tertiary routes to the best optimal path. in the process. This established a series of new ‘endpoints’, particularly in the far west of Cornwall and along its south coast.