Road stations in Roman and Late Antique world are a quite complicated item to be discussed in terms of typology, spatial relationship with roads and chronology, since all these aspects are evidently related with the maintenance/transformation of road system in the changing world. Moreover, this complexity is not counterbalanced by an adequate archaeological knowledge, since our present information is based on very few extensively investigated sites and some limited regional surveys. As attested by an articulated terminology in literary sources, road stations did not respond to a precise typology. Their physical shape was not necessarily related with their function, as the function itself could have been operated (as really it was) by a number of different buildings/spaces, which concrete forms may vary largely, depending on regional, climatic and cultural factors. By converse, a specific function cannot be easily related with specific mobile archaeological finds: we are not able to detect a ‘typical’ find assemblage to be connected with road station service, even if a high ratio on small/medium value coins in archaeological deposits could be theoretically assumed as a proxy indicator of small economic activities, frequently related with hospitality offered to travellers. The most important archaeological indicator remains of course a more or less close relationship with the road system, which is by its side one of the most neglected subject of extensive archaeological investigation. This was made clear by recent extensive rescue archaeological projects in France, where the planning of new large infrastructures (mainly highways) determined a new perception of the complexity of the network of small settlements related to the roads. This extensive approach allows us to better understand the interaction between a single road station and the surrounding territory. From one side, road stations (especially the largest mansiones) can be assumed as a sort of ‘meteorites’, strictly related to the establishment of a new road and/or the organisation of vehiculatio/cursus publicus service into a preexisting landscape. From this point of view a road station can be seen as an externally driven item that impacts on a micro-territory, changing for a long time the overall structure of the territory itself. In other words, it can be seen as a piece of imperial macro-economic system that enters in a direct and close contact with a single local territory/community. In this view, road stations could be read in many ways as a sort of ‘non-lieux’, using a concept of contemporary anthropology, to define their close relationship with imperial urban system: they play the role of urban filaments distributed along the roads connecting the cities network. From the other side, this new item creates necessarily a new local micro-economy, introducing an element of dynamism (new connections, new opportunities, new markets) that lasts for the entire lifespan of the road station itself and may also survive after its end. In some way, in fact, the creation of a new relationship between the local scale and a larger one (regional, imperial) may change the whole local micro-ecology that regulated also the distribution of people into a territory and the ways that people used land resources. From this point of view, at least the largest road stations can be reasonably assumed as new central places of the anthropic landscape, as they concentrated some of the main organising functions of a micro-territory. This research perspective requests specific large scale projects to be properly pursued, but some images derived from current research seems to be truly promising. Human settlement so intimately related with the nodes of road system were evidently physical point of connectivity between local territory and the general system of distribution of goods in the Roman economy. From this point of view, they easily acted as local hubs to collect goods from surrounding territory and to convey them towards regional and interregional markets and, by converse, as points of redistribution for the ‘external’ goods moving along roads. This aspect was truly important during the long and complicated transition to Late Antiquity. In the new socio-economic scenery, the settlements along the roads played a very significant role in articulating and differentiating the process of landscape transformation, because an important and long living road station possessed all the characters to transform itself into a new small nucleus of intensification of population within the rarefied human landscape of Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages.

Zanini, E. (2016). Qualche appunto per un’archeologia contestuale delle stazioni di sosta nel mondo romano e tardoantico. In E.Z. P. Basso (a cura di), Statio amoena. Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane (pp. 71-80). Oxford : Archaeopress.

Qualche appunto per un’archeologia contestuale delle stazioni di sosta nel mondo romano e tardoantico

ZANINI, ENRICO
2016-01-01

Abstract

Road stations in Roman and Late Antique world are a quite complicated item to be discussed in terms of typology, spatial relationship with roads and chronology, since all these aspects are evidently related with the maintenance/transformation of road system in the changing world. Moreover, this complexity is not counterbalanced by an adequate archaeological knowledge, since our present information is based on very few extensively investigated sites and some limited regional surveys. As attested by an articulated terminology in literary sources, road stations did not respond to a precise typology. Their physical shape was not necessarily related with their function, as the function itself could have been operated (as really it was) by a number of different buildings/spaces, which concrete forms may vary largely, depending on regional, climatic and cultural factors. By converse, a specific function cannot be easily related with specific mobile archaeological finds: we are not able to detect a ‘typical’ find assemblage to be connected with road station service, even if a high ratio on small/medium value coins in archaeological deposits could be theoretically assumed as a proxy indicator of small economic activities, frequently related with hospitality offered to travellers. The most important archaeological indicator remains of course a more or less close relationship with the road system, which is by its side one of the most neglected subject of extensive archaeological investigation. This was made clear by recent extensive rescue archaeological projects in France, where the planning of new large infrastructures (mainly highways) determined a new perception of the complexity of the network of small settlements related to the roads. This extensive approach allows us to better understand the interaction between a single road station and the surrounding territory. From one side, road stations (especially the largest mansiones) can be assumed as a sort of ‘meteorites’, strictly related to the establishment of a new road and/or the organisation of vehiculatio/cursus publicus service into a preexisting landscape. From this point of view a road station can be seen as an externally driven item that impacts on a micro-territory, changing for a long time the overall structure of the territory itself. In other words, it can be seen as a piece of imperial macro-economic system that enters in a direct and close contact with a single local territory/community. In this view, road stations could be read in many ways as a sort of ‘non-lieux’, using a concept of contemporary anthropology, to define their close relationship with imperial urban system: they play the role of urban filaments distributed along the roads connecting the cities network. From the other side, this new item creates necessarily a new local micro-economy, introducing an element of dynamism (new connections, new opportunities, new markets) that lasts for the entire lifespan of the road station itself and may also survive after its end. In some way, in fact, the creation of a new relationship between the local scale and a larger one (regional, imperial) may change the whole local micro-ecology that regulated also the distribution of people into a territory and the ways that people used land resources. From this point of view, at least the largest road stations can be reasonably assumed as new central places of the anthropic landscape, as they concentrated some of the main organising functions of a micro-territory. This research perspective requests specific large scale projects to be properly pursued, but some images derived from current research seems to be truly promising. Human settlement so intimately related with the nodes of road system were evidently physical point of connectivity between local territory and the general system of distribution of goods in the Roman economy. From this point of view, they easily acted as local hubs to collect goods from surrounding territory and to convey them towards regional and interregional markets and, by converse, as points of redistribution for the ‘external’ goods moving along roads. This aspect was truly important during the long and complicated transition to Late Antiquity. In the new socio-economic scenery, the settlements along the roads played a very significant role in articulating and differentiating the process of landscape transformation, because an important and long living road station possessed all the characters to transform itself into a new small nucleus of intensification of population within the rarefied human landscape of Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages.
2016
978 1 78491 498 1
Zanini, E. (2016). Qualche appunto per un’archeologia contestuale delle stazioni di sosta nel mondo romano e tardoantico. In E.Z. P. Basso (a cura di), Statio amoena. Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane (pp. 71-80). Oxford : Archaeopress.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11365/1007579