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All roads may have once led to Rome — but those roads stretched 50% longer than previously known, according to a new digital atlas published this week.
The study, called Itiner-e, mapped nearly 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roadways across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, expanding the known network by over 100,000 kilometers, The Associated Press reported.
The last comprehensive atlas was released 25 years ago — but it relied on incomplete records and analogue mapping.
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New digital methods and satellite tools have transformed what people can see today of the ancient world, said researchers.
A team of archaeologists, across a span of five years, combed through historical records, ancient journals, locations of milestones and other archival data.
Scientists then looked for clues in satellite imagery and aerial photography, including recently digitized photos taken from planes during World War II, AP reported.
When ancient accounts hinted at lost roads in a certain area, researchers analyzed the terrain from above to spot subtle traces — such as faint differences in vegetation, soil variations or shifts in elevation, as well as traces of ancient engineering like raised mounds or cut hillsides.
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Those things revealed where Roman lanes once ran.
“It becomes a massive game of connecting the dots on a continental scale,” Tom Brughmans, an archaeologist and co-author of the study published in Scientific Data, told AP.
The atlas shows routes spanning from Spain to Syria, connecting more than 5,000 ancient settlements.
Researchers previously tallied the extent of Roman roads at about 117,000 miles (188,000 km) — mostly the “highways of the Roman Empire,” said AP.
The new work identifies a vast network of secondary roads linking villas, farms and military outposts.
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The study added a lot to archaeologists’ knowledge of ancient roads in North Africa, France’s interior plains and the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece — regions that had been under-documented in prior maps.
“This will be a very foundational work for a lot of other research,” Benjamin Ducke of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, who was not involved in the project, told AP.
One caveat, he said, is that it’s still not clear if all the roads were open and active at the same time.
The name Itiner-e is a nod to Ancient Roman itineraria, or travel registers, that once listed official road stations and distances between towns.
Earlier compilations attempted to visualize this world, but the new atlas combines historical documents with modern GIS analysis, LiDAR and crowdsourced archaeological data.
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The release from Scientific Data indicated that only 2% to 3% of mapped routes have “high certainty” — meaning that clear physical traces remain. The rest are probable or inferred, supported by multiple historical or environmental indicators, the study noted.
The ability to visualize the ancient routes that Roman farmers, soldiers, diplomats and other travelers took can provide a better understanding of key historical trends that depended on the movement of people during Roman times, said Brughmans — including the rise of Christianity across the region and the spread of ancient outbreaks.
“The Romans left a huge impact with this road network,” which created the blueprint for many roads still in use today, said study co-author Adam Pažout of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
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Experts say the atlas could reshape scholarship on imperial logistics, trade networks and cultural diffusion.
“The Romans left a huge impact with this road network.”
Historians studying military supply routes, ancient pandemics or agricultural distribution can now use the open dataset to model how goods and ideas traveled.
The data and an interactive map are free and available for scholars, educators and the public at itiner-e.org, where users can explore routes, milestones and ancient settlements in detail, AP reported.
Findings connected to Ancient Rome continue to provide compelling insights not just for scientists and academics, but for interested travelers and the public at large.
Recently, archaeologists found a massive stone basin in Italy dating back more than 2,000 years — remnants of a once-powerful rival of Rome.
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The discovery was found in the ancient ruins of Gabii, about 11 miles east of Rome. University of Missouri archaeologists uncovered the remains, according to a university press release. Experts estimated the basin was built around 250 B.C.
Andrea Margolis of Fox News Digital, as well as The Associated Press, contributed reporting.
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