The INscribed city: urban structures and interaction in ROME

ongoing

Rome as the first-ever mega-city reaching c.1 million inhabitants in the early empire (1st cent. BCE), remains an enigma regarding the way it organised itself and maintained that size for over three centuries. Having long outgrown the 4th-cent. BCE city walls, the urbanistic structures that developed outside of these, and especially outside the later Aurelian Wall, have never been studied systematically and holistically. IN-ROME aims to fill this fundamental gap. It will describe for the first time how different parts of the population (ethnicities, status groups, genders) and their activities map onto the city’s surroundings via military stations, association seats, sanctuaries, production sites, mines, agriculture, retail, baths, guesthouses, tombs and villas. Translating topographical relations into social ones, it aims significantly to enhance our understanding of the city’s social fabric. Methodologically, IN-ROME breaks new ground by unlocking the enormous potential of inscriptions for our understanding of Rome’s urban development and social fabric through virtual re-contextualisation and statistical analysis. The authoritative Epigraphic Database Roma will be extended to include all Latin and Greek inscriptions with known or probable provenance (totalling c.50,000). They will be linked to Rome’s most sophisticated Digital Archaeological Cadastre, SITAR, via a newly created map layer of 17th-20th-cent. properties (the main historic reference to location). These new resources will allow the exploration of topographical patterns of activities on an unprecedented scale, revolutionising access to a vast pool of historic information and restoring Rome’s people back into their landscape. Outputs include six books and two international conferences with proceedings. The geo-referenced inscriptions and historic property map will be lasting resources beyond this project, and will radically transform a wide range of research from multiple disciplines.