Oksanen, Eljas;
Brookes, Stuart;
(2025)
The afterlife of Roman roads in England: insights from the fifteenth-century Gough map of Great Britain.
Journal of Archaeological Science
, 179
, Article 106227. 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106227.
Preview |
PDF
1-s2.0-S0305440325000767-main.pdf - Published Version Download (8MB) | Preview |
Abstract
This paper presents a new Geographic Information Systems database of travel and communications routes in England and Wales derived from medieval cartographic evidence. We argue on the basis of archaeological, physical landscape, onomastic, documentary, cartographic and other historical evidence that the network of red distance lines on the Gough Map of Great Britain, dated c. fifteenth century, represents travel routes and roads connecting medieval settlements. As such it constitutes the earliest depiction of a British network of medieval overland routes at a reasonable level of complexity and geographical extent. Taking this as a very partial, but important, sample of the fuller medieval travel networks, we investigate which elements were carried over from the road network of Roman Britain. Using a selection of computational and qualitative methods and approaches, we thereby evaluate the character, regionality and relative quantity of Roman routeway survival, shedding light into the complex transformations of human landscapes that occurred both at macro (national) and micro (regional, local) scales across approximately one thousand years.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The afterlife of Roman roads in England: insights from the fifteenth-century Gough map of Great Britain |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106227 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106227 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Travel and communication, Roman period, Middle ages, England and Wales, Spatial Analysis and GIS, Historical maps, Socio-economic history, Landscape archaeology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207831 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
