Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire

The principal aims of Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Empire and to explain why these systems looked the way they did.While some chapters focus on settlements that were cities or towns from a juridical point of view, the implications of using a purely functional definition of towns are also explored. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities belonging to various size brackets, economic relationships between self-governing cities and their territories and the role of cities as nodes in road systems and maritime networks. In addition, it is argued that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portugal were poly-centric rather than based on a single urban centre.The volume will be of interest to anyone working on Roman urbanism as well as those interested in the Iberian Peninsula in the Roman period.

About the Author

Pieter Houten is a research fellow within the ERC-project 'LatinNow: Latinization of the North-Western Provinces' at the University of Nottingham, UK, and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford, UK. He wrote his PhD thesis Civitates Hispaniae within the ERC-funded project ‘An Empire of 2,000 Cities’ at Leiden University, Netherlands. His research focuses on urbanisation and Latinisation on the Iberian Peninsula in the Roman period.