Roman Archaeology – Urbanism and the organization of space in the Roman world (PhD)

Human life unfolds in space and through an appropriation of the natural environment. The study of urbanism considers primarily the built environment from various angles: the provision of buildings for a range of different purposes such as habitation, administration, production, commerce, religious cult etc., and the organization of these buildings within a city. The countryside around the inner city is equally used and organised in various ways, for instance for agricultural production, villas, burial and mining. As Almusaed and Almssad (2020) noted: “Cities are not just a sum of buildings, but especially a set of social relations that their inhabitants develop” – and the same can be said for the landscape surrounding them: they are areas shaped not only by nature but also by human activity. Studying urbanism and the organization of space can therefore offer unique insights into the ways people lived – and how they lived together – that adds to and sometimes challenges views expressed in our literary sources.

*This module will not be a duplication of the Urbanism course offered by Prof. Fabiani at UniPi.* Students are requested to acquire knowledge of key building types and architectural features of cities and how they are typically organized spatially before or during the academic year through independent reading or another module. We will focus on a wide range of methodological approaches to interpreting the archaeological evidence, from attempts to reconstruct the lived experience to economic history, from network theory to ‘mapping social history’, an approach used in the ERC-funded IN-ROME project. Students will have the opportunity to use and experiment with the unique resources created for the IN-ROME project to pursue their own limited research projects.