The Roman Road Project - Paving the Way

If you're anything like me, when I'm working on a project, I'm so into the research, that I can quote numerous authors down to the paragraph and page number. But after the project is over, I tend to forget details. This blog post is an attempt to document what I did to prepare for the Roman Road Project, not only as a means of sharing with others that want to do similar work but also for my own benefit. I'm including experts I reached out to, texts I read, articles I found, and books I bought or borrowed. I hope it helps you "pave the way" to your own Roman road project.

People:

Dr. Eric Poehler is a classics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Having read his Traffic Systems of Pompeii, I emailed him for general information on Roman roads. He kindly sent me several of his articles, including my favorite one on the Romans' use of molten iron to repair streets. And by the way, if you're ever hesitating to reach out to a perfect stranger in the professional world, don't! Every expert I've ever contacted has been utterly thrilled to have someone ask about their work. Dr. Poehler was especially delighted that we were using his work in an ancient road project.

Dr. Tyson Rupnow, P.E., Ph.D., is the associate director of research at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center (the research arm of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development) and an adjunct professor in construction management at Louisiana State University. Reaching out to him early was the best decision I made for this project. Tyson became our guide and civil engineering expert for the project. I learned an incredible amount of information from him as did my students. He taught the students famous engineering expressions like "We aren't buildin' a watch!" But please don't call this man - find your own local DOD or DOTD person in your state or area. They will have more specialized knowledge about YOUR specific location. All of these departments have education outreach programs too.

Dr. Courtney Roby is a classics professor at Cornell University. I met her when we presented on a STEM in Classics panel at CANE's annual conference. She talked about how she taught her students to use a groma in a surveying exercise, and I was hooked reading her work. Without her expert advice and generosity of time, I would not have seen some crucial texts about Roman surveying tools.

Books:

Jean-Pierre Adam's Roman Building: Materials and Techniques, 1994. I bought this one late in the game, and when it arrived, I wished immediately that I had gotten it sooner. The pictures and diagrams in this book are unmatched! I still haven't had a chance to read it completely, but I'm confident that I'll develop many future Roman Technology class lessons from the information in this book.

Hugh Davies' Roman Roads in Britain, 2008. More so about the legacy of Roman roads and their influence of modern roadways, this book was a nice read.

O. A. W. Dilke's The Roman Land Surveyors: an Introduction to the Agrimensores, 1971. Shoulda bought it, may still (stay tuned LOL) even though it's $90. He writes so clearly, and his conversion table of Roman measurement - chef's kiss! Thanks to Courtney Roby for introducing me to this work.

M. J. T. Lewis' Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome, 2001. At first, I tried to get by with borrowing this book from the library, but I ended up just buying it because his explanations of groma surveying and road construction were so specific and helpful. Even better was his list of classical sources for all the instruments he discussed - I can't stress this enough! I like to show kids the literary evidence for all the technology we discuss, and sometimes, that's hard to find. So, this source list was a dream come true.

John Peter Oleson's (editor) The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, 2008. I use this text as my go-to for anything STEM related in classics, but the article on roads quoted Vitruvius (see Poehler below) and was not focused on the building process.

John Peter Oleson's (editor and author) Building for Eternity: The History and Technology of Roman Concrete Engineering in the Sea, 2014. I've been drooling over this book for a while, and I finally bought it...only to give it as a thank-you gift to Tyson. I liked reading about how the team used concrete core samples to identify the sources of volcanic ash. The process reminded me of how LaDOTD tests asphalt and cement cores in their lab. One day...maybe I'll have my own copy. It's a very niche book from which I doubt I'll develop lessons, but some books are just good foundations for knowledge. There's always a kid asking some crazy question about Roman concrete.

Eric Poehler's The Traffic Systems of Pompeii, 2017. On page 12, he clears up issues with Vitruvius' supposed explanation of how Roman roads were built: the ancient architect wasn't describing a road, but a building foundation. This point was critical for me because nearly every article I read about the building of Roman roads referenced it as fact. In addition, I enjoyed reading Poehler's work on digital cataloging and data analysis in archaeology. His team has made some interesting discoveries using these techniques including the fact that Romans drove on the right side of the road.

Articles:

Hugh McCague's "Learning from the Roman Land Surveyors: A Mathematical Field Exercise," in Hands-on History: A Resource for Teaching Mathematics (editor, Amy Shell Gellasch), 2007. The author explains how to construct and use Roman surveying equipment, a groma (ancient transit) and decempeda (measuring rod), to lay out the two main roads of a Roman town. Very precise instructions and great exercise if you have a small class. Otherwise, you'll have to divide into smaller teams and lay out different towns. I didn't use this lesson, but I plan to in the future.

Poehler, Van Roggen, and Crowther's "The Iron Streets of Pompeii" (2019) in the American Journal of Archaeology gave us ideas on how to repair busted streets. The Romans used molten iron. We decided that might be too dangerous with 11-year-olds so we approximated - metal-colored resin. Here's a synopsis of the article.

I wish there were an article about the remains of a groma found in the shop of the blacksmith in Pompeii. Courtney Roby sent me this link to a picture of it. Also of interest are two gravestones featuring the surveying equipment: the one in Boscoreale and the one in Bologna.

Videos:

Fantastic video on how the Romans built straight roads in ancient Britain using a groma. It's a snippet of a longer series uploaded to YouTube by a fan so I've been unable to locate it the name of the series. If you know, please email me!

A Roman surveyor re-enactor shows in this video how they set up a military camp with a groma. He demonstrates perfectly the use of an oil pot to dampen the swing of the plum bob caused by the wind.

Rami Tamimi is a civil engineer with a fantastic YouTube channel all about how to survey land using modern tools. His pacing tutorials - perfection!! One of our first lessons on the Roman Road Project was pacing, and he offered great suggestions on the basics of this process.

Vitruvius' hodometer is bound to come up when talking about measuring distance. His description is in De Architectura, IX, and this video of Da Vinci's version was helpful for students to visualize how the device worked.

Archaeologist Darius Arya recently completed a YouTube video series on the Via Appia - helpful for background knowledge about this particular Roman road.

Websites:

Whenever I'm searching for images of Roman soldiers doing just about anything, I look to Trajan's column. Dr. Roger Ulrich's Website, Trajan's Column in Rome is a comprehensive collection of high-resolution images of the monument as well as research on it. I found great images of road-building here.

Orbis: the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World offered my students some fun imagining travel through the Roman world. I incorporated this fantastic tool into a lesson about milestones.

We really wanted our road to have milestones, but for a variety of reasons, it didn't happen. However, I sure loved learning about the Tabula Peutingeriana - I didn't know that its original version was dated to the first century BCE due to the inclusion of Pompeii on the map. I also introduced the students to the Forma Urbis - can I just mention how awesome this thing was?! And this Website by the Stanford folks was super helpful. In all this searching about how the Romans mapped their world, I was hoping to find a comprehensive list of milestones from the Roman world, but I found no such thing. Many in the British countryside have been repurposed as stones in later-built castles.

I'm sure there's more that I've already forgotten. Putting together a huge project like this is time-consuming but fun. I hope this little bit of background saves someone (and me) some time later on. Maybe I "paved the way" for someone!