roman-amphitheaters
Edited by Sebastian Heath
Introduction
roman-amphitheaters is a dataset published in conjunction with
figures and discussion that has the goal of facilitating the study of
amphitheaters in the Roman world. For the purposes of this project the
category 'Roman amphitheater' comprises relatively large and public
Roman-period oval buildings with rows of seating arrayed around a similarly
oval surface, or arena, on which a variety of entertainments - such as animal
hunts, executions, and gladiatorial combat - took place. The most famous
example of this building type, and also the largest, is the Flavian
Amphitheater, or Colosseum, in Rome. Construction of that edifice began under
the emperor Vespasian (d. AD 79) and entered full and regular use during the
reign of his son Domitian (d. AD 96). It is important to note that of the
three broad categories of activity that took place in amphitheaters, none of
them took place only in amphitheaters. Therefore this dataset is not a
complete map of any single Roman behavior. While it is the case that
amphitheaters are distinctly 'Roman' given that they do not appear outside
the territory of the Empire, they cannot be said to be a necessary component
of Roman culture given that their distribution is very unequal in the
territory that was firmly under imperial control. The publication of this
dataset, and of the figures that use it, is intended to explore this tension
between amphitheaters as a regular but not necessary or universal feature of
Roman presence in the regions that Rome conquered.
The
Dataset
The primary version of the data is the geojson file
'roman-amphitheaters.geojson', which can be rendered as a map by a variety of
freely-available tools. Other data files are derived from that geojson.
Like much information related to the Roman Empire, and to antiquity more
generally, it is unlikely that any single listing of structures can achieve
universal recognition as being either complete or finished. While there are
over 200 structures that are uncontroversially recognized as within the
category, others are not so easily included or rejected. In this dataset,
so-called 'Gall-Roman' amphitheaters that combine features of theaters and amphitheaters
are, or will be, included. Theaters that were later converted for display of
gladiatorial combat are not.
Wikipedia's list of Roman amphitheaters at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_amphitheatres
was an early source for the initial versions of this list. Tom Elliott added
data from the Pleiades Project. In summer 2015, D. Bennett added orientation
and other data. The full history of edits and contributions are available in
the history of this github repository.
For users interested in acquiring just the current version of this resource,
it should be sufficient to download the zip archive from github.com. That
file will be smaller than the full repository...
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