Astronomy in Roman Urbanism: A Statistical Analysis of the Orientation of Roman Towns in the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

The work presented in this article is part of a wide-ranging and ambitious project, started few years ago, to study the role of astronomy in Roman urban layout. In particular, the main aim is to check whether Roman cities present astronomical patterns in their orientations. The project emerged from ideas on how to properly orientate the main streets of a Roman town, as attested in a number of ancient texts and later discussions led by contemporary scholars. We present here the final conclusions of a particular study developed in the Iberian Peninsula (Roman Hispania), where the urbanism that we tend to characterize as properly Roman flourished during both the Republic and the Empire. The sample analysed includes 81 measurements of Roman urban entities spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula and is the largest dataset obtained in a specific region so far. Our results present suggestive orientation patterns that seem to point towards an astronomical intentionality.

Land- and Skyscapes of the Camino de Santiago: An Astronomy and World Heritage Sustainable Approach

“…In the case of the declination magnitude, the resulting curvigram was then compared with other likely distributions in order to test whether the maxima were statistically significant [17,47,69]. One distribution was obtained from a sample of azimuths homogeneously distributed between 0 • and 359 • for a flat horizon and a latitude of 42 1 /2 • , which is the mean latitude of the churches located along the Way.…”

“…This research is in certain aspects a novelty in the scientific literature, the a logical continuation of a series of works developed to better understand the role played by the sky, and notably the sun, in the monumental tradition of the Iberian Peninsula. The topics have been diverse; beginning with megalithic phenomena [13] and followed by Iberian and Celtic studies [14,15], the Roman world [16,17], and early Christian shrines [18]. These works established a paradigm to which this article is indebted.…”

Between Land and Sky—A Study of the Orientation of Roman Centuriations in Italy

“…During recent decades, several researchers on Roman archaeoastronomy have offered a completely different view, by showing that the orientation patterns of several Roman settlements and monuments across the Empire are far from random (see, e.g., [15,16]).…”

“…At present, more than 300 towns have been already measured in Western Europe [10,16,17], the Near East [18] and the Maghreb [19], and astronomical patterns were identified in all regions, some of them shared among different provinces together with regional particularities. In Italy specifically, several Roman towns were studied [20,21], including Rome itself [22], together with the masterpiece of Roman engineering that is the Via Appia [23,24], which is a clear example of the integration of astronomical phenomena in Roman land organization.…”

Archaeoastronomy: A Sustainable Way to Grasp the Skylore of Past Societies

“…The pertinence of such data ought to be reckoned, making questions such as: Were astronomy or astral deities known to be important for the society we are dealing with? (see e.g., [14][15][16][17]). If we do not have any such information, as for prehistoric societies, either we can rely on solid interpretations of the iconography or we can try to proof the intentionality by performing statistical studies that may indicate the existence of orientation patterns that could only be explained by astronomical phenomena (see e.g., [18,19]).…”