

On the orientation of Roman towns in Italy (2007) [pdf] - myrrh
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0703/0703213.pdf

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gcr
When posting links to Arxiv, please link to the web page rather than the PDF
file. It makes it easier to cite the content and to preview what it's about
before reading.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0703213](http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0703213)

    
    
        On the orientation of Roman towns in Italy
        
        Author: Giulio Magli
        Submitted on 23 Mar 2007
        As is well known, several Roman sources report
        on the existence of a town foundation ritual,
        inherited from the Etruscans, which allegedly
        included astronomical references. However, the
        possible existence of astronomical orientations
        in the layout of Roman towns has never been
        tackled in a systematic way. As a first step
        in this direction, the orientation of virtually
        all Roman towns in Italy (38 cities) is studied
        here. Non-random orientation patterns emerge
        from these data, aiming at further research
        in this field.

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rubidium
Nice job collecting the data, but paper could have benefited from a map of the
towns with a legend that shows the orientation of the towns.

The author discusses clusters of towns with orientations, but as a non-subject
matter expert I struggled to follow the trends that may be suggested.

Paper is also incomplete in that the table on the final page doesn't have
headings. I hope the published version in 2008 had it, but it's under-paywall
and doesn't appear on the Authors webpage.

~~~
notahacker
If ever a paper needed a proper appendix its this one.

As a minimum I'd want to see the orientation of the town against it's
topographical features and _the orientation of the Roman roads connecting the
town with its neighbours_ which would seem like the obvious alternate
hypotheses to explain towns' orientations.

