Hello everyone! I build roads and love everthing about them! I am fascinated with ancient construction methods, roads, aqueducts, gardens, everthing! Roman roads look generally very well built. Made to last a very long time, but in a very few pics I see a bed of gravel, a layer of split logs and then gravel again. Now in my experience this seems like a bad idea because of the wood layer rotting. Is there a good reason for this? Is there such thing as a short time road? Any info would be great! Thanks you gals and guys!

As far as I am aware, Roman Roads in Italy are different from Roman roads elsewhere in the Roman Empire. The style of roads could be different reacting to the environment. Logs would make sense in marshy or swampy areas. To gain more knowledge on this, could you elaborate where you got that piece of information from and where that piece of Roman Road is supposed to be?

So, to add a few details: as an archaeologist working in a part of Germany that was part of the Roman Province of Germania Inferior I am most familiar with Roman Roads in that area.

The most famous one is the "Via Belgica". This is one of the biggest cross country roads starting in Cologne and leading due west, crossing into the NEtherlands, then Belgium and finally ending in France in Boulogne-sur-Mer. This road is researched well, because its path once lead through an area which saw excessive open pit mining of Lgnite, so there is lots of archaeolgical publications on it. Though in some parts the trail is buried under modern roads (which lead to some more archaeological excavation and research during roadworks), there are passages where modern roads do not follow the Roman road, and there the trail is still visible using aerial photography or LIDAR scans.

Every time this road has been researched, the construction is the same. As a main road, it is wide. The overall range goes from 18 to 24 m. It is always flanked with two ditches, one on either side, and the trail itself is constisting of layers of gravel. Frequently repairs can be seen, where new layers of gravel were added on top when the previus layers had worn down. As this is a relatively flat area, the natural soil in the Rhineland is consisting of silty soil above a huge amount of sandy/gravelly deposits. So, from aerial photography, the pits where they took all the gravel from are still visible very well, and the whole road is accompanied by them.

On the website of https://www.omnesviae.org/ you can see a synopsis of trails of Roman roads as described in the map system of the Tabula Peutingeriana which are confirmed by archaeological research.

So, in this area, not only the Via Belgica, but all roads are contructed with layers of gravel, because this material is highly useful as well as easy to get and quick to distribute. But we do have plastered roads as well: In Cologne, there is archaeological evidence of roads covered with slabs of basaltic stone. But it would have been far to expensive to to this in the whole province.

I am aware of other examples of a similar construction of Roman roads in the southwest of Germany. Publication can be cited if you wish, but most smallscale publishing on Roman roads in Germany is in German...

I am further aware of Roman roads through the Alps, where no classical construction took place, but the Carriage tracks where embedded in the natural rock - so the area in which contruction took place is highly relevant, and I would like to know more about your example with splitted wood.