Itinere unveils high-resolution map of Roman roads around 150 CE

A team of archaeologists led by Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University has published a new, high-resolution digital map of the Roman Empire's road network around 150 CE, expanding the known system by roughly 60 percent and making the data publicly available for researchers and the public. The dataset, called Itinere, traces nearly 299,200 kilometres of roads across Europe, the Near East and North Africa, covering an area of about 4 million square kilometres and comprising 14,769 road sections classified as main and secondary routes.

Itinere was assembled from two centuries of archaeological and historical research, topographic maps, satellite imagery and earlier databases. The project adapts previously proposed straight-line routes to the contours of the landscape so that mountain passes and winding tracks are represented more realistically. The researchers say the new mapping adds roughly 110,600 kilometres, or 68,700 miles, to earlier estimates and improves coverage particularly in the Iberian Peninsula, Greece and North Africa.

The dataset separates roads by confidence level. Only about 2.7 percent of the mapped network can be located with high precision, nearly 90 percent is...