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Researchers Publish Most Detailed Open Map of Roman Roads, Spanning 299,171 Kilometers

Itiner‑e debuts as a confidence‑coded, topography‑aware reconstruction built to power new research on ancient mobility, trade and disease.

Overview

  • The team mapped 299,171 kilometers of routes across roughly four million square kilometers of the empire at its second‑century peak.
  • About 103,478 kilometers are long‑distance viae publicae, with roughly 195,000 kilometers of secondary connections.
  • Only 2.7% of segments have securely known courses, around 90% are inferred and about 7% are hypothetical, with these uncertainties made explicit in the metadata.
  • Coverage expands especially in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and Greece, using archaeological records, milestones, remote sensing and GIS to trace plausible passes rather than straight lines.
  • The interactive map is available at itiner‑e.org, and the open dataset—including 14,769 segment records—is downloadable on Zenodo for reproducible analysis.