Water In The Roman World

Taking a broad geographical, temporal, and cross-disciplinary approach, this volume explores new and innovative research which focuses on rivers and waterways from across the Roman world. Rivers and Waterways in the Roman World brings together cross-disciplinary chapters focussing on theoretical approaches, new digital and scientific methods and analytical techniques, and related surveying and excavation case studies to examine the Romans' extensive use of rivers and inland waterways around the Empire. Roman seafaring is well studied, but this book expands our knowledge of Roman transport, communication, and trade networks inland. The book highlights the challenges of archaeological work in the dynamic environments of rivers and waterways and showcases the use of new methodologies, including the increasing availability and accessibility of digital technologies that have led to a growth in the development and application of new archaeological and analytical techniques, as well as the discovery of new archaeological sites, many of which were previously inaccessible. This book is for archaeologists, historians, classicists, and geographers with an interest in the history and archaeology of the Roman Empire. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Offering a wide and expansive new treatment of the role water played in the lives of people across the Roman world, papers consider ports and their lighthouses; water engineering, whether for canals in the north-west provinces, or for the digging of wells for drinking water; baths for swimming; and spas.

This article seeks to define ‘water culture’ in Roman society by examining literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, while understanding modern trends in scholarship related to the study of Roman water.

Explores the water system that made ancient Rome possible

Focusing attention on gravity-fed water-flow systems in medieval cities and monasteries, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire challenges the view that hydraulic engineering died with the Romans and remained moribund until the Renaissance. Roberta Magnusson explores the systems' technologies -- how they worked, what uses the water served -- and also the social rifts that created struggles over access to this basic necessity. Mindful of theoretical questions about what hastens technological change and how society and technology mutually influence one another, the author supplies a thoughtful and instructive study. Archeological, historical, and literary evidence vividly depicts those who designed, constructed, and used medieval water systems and demonstrates a shift from a public-administrative to a private-innovative framework -- one that argues for the importance of local initiatives. "The following chapters attempt to chart a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of technological and social determinism. While writing them, I have tried to strike a balance between the technical and human aspects of medieval hydraulic systems, and to remember that beneath the welter of documents and diffusion patterns, configurations and components, ordinances and expenditures, lie the perceptions, the choices, and often the plain hard work of individual men and women." -- from the Preface

The Edges of the Roman World is a volume consisting of seventeen papers dealing with different approaches to cultural changes that occurred in the context of Roman imperial politics. Papers are mainly focused on societies on the fringes, both social and geographical, and their response to Roman Imperialism. This volume is not a textbook, but rather a collection of different approaches which address the same problem of Roman Imperialism in local contexts. The volume is greatly inspired by the first “Imperialism and Identities at the Edges of the Roman World” conference, held at the Petnica Science Center in 2012.

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, Koloski-Ostrow's work challenges common perceptions of Romans' social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, Koloski-Ostrow reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.

When originally published in 1987, this book was hailed as a landmark in the study of the Roman World. Now back in print with a new preface by the author, it is still the most comprehensive survey of the Roman World available. Ranging from the founding of Rome in the eighth century BC, and throughout the Empire and beyond this book will continue to be an essential resource on the subject for many years to come.