Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal

<p>The principal aims of <i>Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>