The INscribed city: urban structures and interaction in ROME

Introduction

Rome, as the first-ever mega-city reaching approximately 1 million inhabitants in the early empire (1st century BCE), remains an enigma regarding the way it organized itself and maintained that size for over three centuries. Having long outgrown the 4th-century 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.

Project Aim

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
• Villas

Translating topographical relations into social ones, it aims significantly to enhance our understanding of the city's social fabric.

Methodology

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-contextualization and statistical analysis.

The authoritative Epigraphic Database Roma will be extended to include all Latin and Greek inscriptions with known or probable provenance (totalling approximately 50,000). These inscriptions will be linked to Rome's most sophisticated Digital Archaeological Cadastre, SITAR, via a newly created map layer of 17th-20th-century properties (the main historic reference to location).

Expected Outcomes

These new resources will allow the exploration of topographical patterns of activities on an unprecedented scale, revolutionizing access to a vast pool of historic information and restoring Rome's people back into their landscape.

Outputs include:

1. Six books
2. 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.