Alan Kaiser
Ignored and taken for granted for much of the last century, Roman urban thoroughfares have recently become a focus for some lively scholarly inquiry. Within the last two decades archaeologists, particularly those working at Pompeii, have demonstrated a new interest in streets per se (Schneider 1982; Tsujimura 1991; Gesemann 1995; Davies 2002; Jones and Schoonhoven 2003; Poehler 2006; Van Tilburg 2006; Hartnett 2008) or in the Romans’ understanding of their urban environments from their streets (MacDonald 1986; Favro 1994; Laurence 1994; Yegul 1994; Wallace-Hadrill 1995; Favro 1996; Saliou 1999; Ellis 2004a). New theoretical and methodological approaches for analyzing urban streets have accompanied this fresh interest. While the new attention is certain to restructure our understanding of Roman urban studies, one aspect of street studies that has yet to be explored is the relationship of the Latin vocabulary for Roman urban streets to the actual physical remains of those streets themselves. The Latin vocabulary for urban streets is rich and bears culturally significant differences from the equivalent English vocabulary that are often overlooked in translation and thus ignored. In the following study I will present this vocabulary in context to reveal a dichotomy between two categories of streets based on their physical appearance and the activities which took place along them. I will then compare the definitions of these two categories to the physical evidence from the best-preserved and best-excavated of all Roman cities, Pompeii. While the results are still preliminary, a statistical analysis of the physical makeup of streets along with the use of buildings that lined them suggests that the mental categories found in the Latin vocabulary for urban streets were reflected in the physical fabric of streets. Cultural perceptions of streets, therefore, shaped the streetscape and dictated the use of much urban space.
World History
