An international research team based at Aarhus University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has mapped almost 300,000 kilometres of Roman roads – more than 100,000 kilometres more than previously known. The results are published in the scientific journal Nature Scientific Data and provide a new and far more detailed picture of how the Roman Empire was connected.

The new open access map brings together centuries of archaeological and historical research in one digital map of the Roman Empire around 150 e.Kr and gives researchers and the public access to the most complete digital overview of the Roman Empire's road system to date.

"The dataset gives us a whole new tool to understand how the Roman Empire's roads shaped trade, mobility, and contact across the empire," says Tom Brughmans, associate professor of classical archaeology.

Whereas previous maps of Roman roads reached about 188,000 kilometers, the new map shows that the road network actually stretched over 299,171 kilometers. The significant difference is due to both a greater geographical coverage and a much more precise digitalisation, where the roads follow the natural shapes of the landscape – mountains, valleys and rivers – instead of being drawn as straight lines.

But even with the most comprehensive mapping so far, there is still a lot that researchers do not know for sure. Only 2.7 percent of the road network's location is known with certainty. The vast majority – almost 90 percent – are less certain and are based on historical sources and topographical analyses, for example milestones that indicate where the roads have passed, but without knowing the exact alignment. The remaining 7.4 percent is still hypothetical.

"The map shows not only where the Roman Empire's roads were, but also how sure the researchers are of their exact location. Only 2.7% of the road network is documented, where the location is known with a high degree of certainty," says Tom Brughmans.

New perspectives on the ancient world

The dataset brings together information from archaeological reports, classic sources such as the Antonine Itinerary and Tabula Peutingeriana, landmarks, and modern satellite data. Each stretch of road has been manually digitized to create an accurate, interactive map of the Roman Empire in its heyday.

The result is a tool that not only maps the paths of the past, but also opens up new possibilities for understanding how people, goods, ideas – and even diseases – moved across three continents.

Itiner-e is freely available online and can be used by researchers, students and anyone with an interest in antiquity.

"Itiner-e provides a transformative foundation for understanding how the Roman Empire's road system structured the movement of people, goods, ideas, and even ancient pandemics," says Tom Brughmans.

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Study

Type:
Open data collection and mapping in classical archaeology and ancient history

External funding:
This work is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) through a Sapere Aude research leader scholarship for the project MINERVA; The Carlsberg Foundation's Young Researcher Fellowship for The Past Social Networks Project; The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) and the Viator-e project, which is funded by MCIN and by FEDER.

Link to scientific publication:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06140-z

See more here:
https://itiner-e.org

Tom Brughmans, Associate Professor
Classical Archaeology,
Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Mail: t.b.@cas.au.dk
Telefon: +45 8716 2004