Roman Dacia: roads and frontier corridors

What you are looking at

Two things in one layer, told apart by line style: the road network of the province, and the frontier corridors of the limes.

How to read this layer

Nothing here is digitised from a survey.

A road is a line joining attested stations in their attested order. It shows that these places were connected in this sequence. It does not show where the road ran between them, and it will cut across terrain that any real road went around.

A limes corridor is a band this project drew to show roughly where the frontier works lay. It is not a line of fortifications traced from the ground.

Roads render solid, corridors dashed, and the two carry different widths, so the distinction survives without colour.

Historical scope

AD 106 to 271.

Sources and evidence

Road courses derive from the station sequences in the corpus, which rest on the itineraries and the standard road literature. The limes corridors are editorial throughout, drawn from published accounts of the frontier works.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

This is the layer on the Dacia map where the gap between evidence and geometry is widest, which is why the styling makes the gap visible rather than putting it in a footnote. A reader should be able to tell at a glance which lines are inferences from attested points and which are this project’s drawing.

See the shared Dacia GIS method for the rule behind that.

Data fields

feature_type, confidence, geometry_provenance and review_status. See the Dacia data fields.

Data and downloads

GeoJSON under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Terra Chartarum; roads joined from corpus stations, frontier corridors drawn editorially.