How to identify a Roman Road by Mike Haken

You might think that this was a simple question to answer, however you would be very wrong. In this lecture, the RRRA chairman will look at the wide variations in how Roman roads were laid out and constructed, and how this impacts on identifying their remains on the ground today. He will also show how to avoid being misled when using technologies such as lidar, and how some of the traditional assumptions about so called ‘fossilised’ roads have led to serious misinterpretations in the past. The lecture concludes with a brief look at a systematic method of rating the probability of any given feature actually being a Roman road, as proposed by Mike in a recent paper published in RRRA’s journal, Itinera.