Ancient Transportation

Searching for articles on wagon-construction in roman times, a much referred hit is Dr. Judith A. Weller et al. on the “Roman Traction System“. It is an article on www.humanist.de, but so far the only article here related to roman wagons and land-transportation. A lot of pages concerning the roman empire has a link to this article. Now I’ve made this link, too.

The article is most concerned on the traction systems, but it has a chapter on wagon-construction, which, besides a few errors, is interesting reading. Including good pictures.

Working with roman wagons you have to make a note on the roads. A lot of scholars around the world have been working on this subject and therefore I will not spend that much energy on the roads themselves.

The roman roads are, no doubt, one of the greatest works of engineering in the ancient world, not alone for their stability and longtime durability but also for what they carried along ex. bridges, tunnels and caves in mountain-areas. The roads are also one of the main reasons why the romans could keep the control of an empire stretching from the River Rhine to the Sahara dessert and from the Atlantic Ocean to the River Euphrates, because they guarantied the infrastructure and thereby secured the possibility of moving large troops a long distance in a short amount of time. (Click here to find out more about the roman roads)

However, my interest in the roman roads concern the tracks of usage discovered in many original road-pavings around the Mediterranean. Here below are some examples of roman roads with marks of wagon-usage. These four roads, and the one shown in the blog-header, are all roman roads found in Italy, but there are also known roads from the roman provinces around the Mediterranean. The roads are, from the left; from Pompeii (the city area), Via Amerina (outside Falerii Novi), Rusellae (the forum area), Vulci (the road towards Ponte Rotto) and the header is from Ostia Antica (main road). All photos are my own.

The romans made a lot of pictures of how they saw the world and everything in it, and this gallery include pictures, in different quality, style and medium, of various kinds of roman wagons. Therefore we have a large material in this category of archaeological evidence. 

The roman pictures include carvings, paintings and mosaics showing roman wagons, two and four-wheeled vehicles, with/without people and/or goods, wagons in (or in no) motion and pictures with various kinds of wagonparts, mostly wheels. Some of these pictures happen to be very detailed and they are therefore, in my opinion, great evidence in the study of roman wagons.

Here below are some examples of roman picture-work showing roman wagons. All photos are my own.

1. Detail of roman wheel. Carving, Arlon, Belgium

2. Detail of roman wagon. Carving, Budapest, Hungary. 

3. Mosaic showing a fourwheeled wagon, photo in Saalburg, Germany.

4. Bronzemodel of lower part of a wagon, Bonn, Germany

First thing first; In a thesis concerning roman wagons the first set of evidence need to be the wagons themselves.

In this part the archaeological evidence is, in my opinion, grouped in three different kinds of material:

1. The wooden parts
2. The iron fittings
3. The wagonbronzes (decorative)

The wooden part is the greatest part of the wagon, but it is actually the group of material of which we have the weakest knowledge because of the bad preservation of wood in most archaeological areas and excavations. Luckily we do once in a while find wooden material and in a few cases these bits are wagonparts. Often the wooden wagonparts found is some part of a wheel. It might be because we know how the wheel or a part of it should look like and we therefore recognises it, or it might be due to the fact that wagonwheels in roman (and medieval) times where used to form the bottom part of wells in more areas, which means they had perfect conditions for preservation and thereby survive to our days modern excavations.

There are some known pieces of wooden wagonparts in Italy, but most of the preservated wagonmaterial of wood is found in the northern roman provinces and is therefore now located, among others, in Germany and The Netherlands.

The iron fittings on the other hand is mostly known from archaeological finds in graves or deposits, especially from graves in Hungary and Bulgaria, and from the roman limes in Germany, where a deposit of iron fittings from parts of roman wagons have been found by Neupotz.

The iron parts are used to strengthen the wagon, which means most wagonfittings are used around the wheels and movable parts. Some ironfittings are also used as plates on the upper part of the wagon, but such plates are more common in the next group of wagonparts; the wagonbronzes, which are, for the larger part, ornamental elements in the construction of roman wagons.

The wagonbronzes are often seen as a decorative element in the wagon construction but they sometimes have a more important role to play in the wagons function and comfort.

Wagonbronzes are usually found with other wagonparts in graves and deposits, but because of their economic and ornamental value some are also found in houses and as single finds without any relevant context. On the function of some interesting bronzes I shall return in another post. 

The study of roman wagons has more entrances in the material culture, meaning, the evidence from the “real wagons”, or what’s left of them, does not alone complete the picture of what the roman wagons actually looked like or how they worked. Therefore my study takes set in three different parts of the archaeological evidence concerning roman wagons. These are:

1. The actual wagon-parts
2. The “roman pictures” of roman wagons
3. The roman roads

In my next posts I will try to explain my thoughts on the three entrances, define their differences and there-next give my view on why each of them is important in the study of roman wagons.

Transport and transportation is and was allways an important factor for a “modern” society. Roads, railroads, containerships and air crafts are all important for us today, to keep the world moving, and they are all actors in our understanding of transportation.

This blog, however, is mostly concerned with the Romans and their idea of transportation. I will concentrate my writing on roman wagons and wagontechnology, but also make parrallels on more modern material, whereever I find it interesting.

I hope to give (and get!) a better “vista” of the wagons and landtransportation in the roman world.

Please feel free to comment on every post in this blog.