The Traffic Systems of Pompeii

Abstract

The Traffic Systems of Pompeii is the first sustained examination of the evidence for a regulated circulation of wheeled traffic in the ancient world. The setting to this system is the six-hundred-year evolution of Pompeii’s street network, the focus of which telescopes from the city’s urban grid to the shape of the streets, the treatment of their surfaces, and finally the individual elements of construction—the curbstones, stepping stones, and guard stones—where the evidence for traffic was inscribed. Although ruts are the most evocative evidence of ancient traffic, it is the wearing patterns on the vertical faces of street features that permit the determination of the directions that ancient carts were traveling and undergird the argument for their systematic regulation. Distilled from over five hundred locations recording multiple categories of evidence, all wholly new to archaeology and unique to this research, this book reveals the basic rules of the road and at the same time opens larger historical questions. What does the existence of a traffic system mean for our understanding of ancient urbanism? What other social forces are uncovered in the search for it? To explore these questions, the traffic system at Pompeii is set in its broader contexts as one infrastructural and administrative artifact of the Roman empire, an epiphenomenon of a deeply urban culture.

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