Do we have an accurate map of Roman Roads?

by northwards

I'm aware of the Tabula Peutingeriana, however it's extremely "abstract". Has anyone converted it into a realistic, detailed map with any degree of accuracy?

white_light-king

I believe the Stanford University Orbis project has a pretty good reputation on this sub. I've seen it alluded to several times without it's accuracy being contested. I would imagine it contains a degree of speculation and estimation but I'm not sure exactly how much.

mythoplokos

The Stanford University Orbis project that u/white_light-king linked has the majority of the 'highways' Romans build, but, the project's main purpose is not to map the roads of the Roman world but to offer a basic virtual simulation of connectivity and travel within the environmental and technological constraints of the time. It's missing the clear majority of roads that Roman era folk were using - roads connecting smaller villages and town, frontier forts etc.

I don't think anyone has ever tried to make a complete map of the Roman roads as of yet, the project would be almost hubristic in scale. If someone was to make a map of all the roads of they would have to make some choices as to what to consider as 'Roman' and 'road'; did Romans have to make the road from scratch or does it count when they build on existing paths? Are the roads made under the Empire but not by Roman authorities or citizens also 'Roman' roads? Does road have to be stone-paved to be a road? Which era are we gonna pick to represent? Tableau Peutingeriana, for example, was made long after the failed conquests of Scotland and it's missing all the roads Romans build there. But, even if you were to identify what are 'Roman roads', our archaeological record of the Roman road network is far from perfect; it can be very difficult to find Roman era roads because new roads were usually just build on top of the old ones, thus destroying lot of the older evidence; and, new traces of previously unknown Roman roads crop up all the time. So, you can imagine that the work to construct the road network is enormous. Quite a lot of scholarship surrounds the Roman roads in Britain if you're interested to look into how historians approach the problems of reconstructing ancient road networks; I'd recommend looking up the newer scholarship, by H.E. Davies (Roads in roman Britain, 2002) and B. Jones & D. J. Mattingly (Atlas of Roman Britain, 2002).

If you're interested especially in the Tabula Peutingeriana, there's the project Omnesviae: http://omnesviae.org , which is a digital reconstruction of that map. It's a free time project of a landscape archaeologist Rène Voolgburg and pretty solid work. The map, however, does not make clear how much interpretation reading the Tabula requires. Because it's a map of the landscape 'as it is experienced' rather than a representation of the geography, and some of the names of places are not otherwise known, the reconstruction takes quite a lot of guesswork. Here's an interesting article about the challenges of digitally reconstructing the Tabula Peutingeriana.

crb11

The Ordnance Survey have produced a map of Roman Britain at 1:625000 scale, intended more for a popular than a scholarly audience, but it should reflect current, or at least recent, scholarship.