In line with the rest of this magazine this column has a Roman theme. The Roman world should have a lot to offer, with some stunning material that should be online. Let’s see what has been made available.
One of the most exciting discoveries of recent years must be the wooden writing tablets excavated at the fort of Vindolanda. The Andrew W. Mellon foundation has supported a project at Oxford University to put the tablets online. The site went live in March 2003 at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/. The tablets are available as high resolution images of the tablets, with transcriptions and translations of the text. The real strength of this site is the ability to browse and search. The Vindolanda trust also has a web site at http://www.vindolanda.com/, describing the site and the latest information about the excavation programme.
Maps seem to be a very popular tool for displaying Roman information. Potsherd is Paul Tyers’ site at www.romanpottery.co.uk (an alias of http://www.potsherd.uklinux.net/index.php). The core is the online atlas of Roman pottery that is gradually turning into an interactive map, showing sources of pottery and their distribution.
Roman archaeology seems to attract as many amateurs as professionals, and some of the web contributions put more professional efforts to shame. One site containing lots of interactive maps of Roman Britain is at http://www.roman-britain.org/. Yet another gazetteer, this time of the Roman military in Britain is at http://www.morgue.demon.co.uk/. This also includes the Roman Gask project to study the early frontier along the Gask ridge in Perthshire.
Of course Britain was only a small part of the Roman Empire. I haven’t yet found a good catalogue of Roman links for the Empire as a whole. One I definitely can’t recommend is ROMARCH at http://acad.depauw.edu/romarch/index.html, which has suffered the fate of many neglected websites – fatal link rot. Probably the best of what there is is the Lacus Curtius site at the University of Kansas to be found at http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/europe/ancient_rome/E/Roman/home.html.
The centre is yet another gazetteer of the Roman World, and it contains lots of photos of Roman sites, digitised copies of out of copyright texts about matters Roman and lots of links to other web sites. As all the links are fully and excessively described, it is not easy to use, and again many of the links are dead. A handy online history of the Roman Empire can be found at http://www.roman-empire.net/ which is useful if you cannot separate Valerian from Valentinian. Also you can vote for best and worst Roman emperor and buy a cut-out card Legionary Helmet. Warning this site does have some annoying pop-up ads.
The Perseus digital library Tufts University has a good collection of classical texts in Greek and Latin with English translations, though they are often older out of copyright translations. The texts are difficult to use, I much prefer to download texts from the Project Gutenberg site at http://promo.net/pg/. Perseus does have a list of Roman sites with lots of pictures available, but again a lot of them are only thumbnails due to copyright reasons. Perseus is at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.
There you have it for this time. The web is currently disappointing when it comes to Roman archaeology, showing the obsession with lists of sites and maps. There are very many fewer pages on actual sites, and very few making the full use of the technology.
© Mark Bell 2003