New Approaches to Identifying Roman Libraries

The identification of Roman libraries has long been the subject of debate, with architectural models, written sources and the archaeological record offering seemingly incompatible perspectives. Mamoli, however, has proposed a solution that deploys computational techniques for studying shape grammar to develop library grammar. This is a computational methodology that identifies minimal units of architectural meaning and the ways they may combine to determine if a built space has enough syntactic coherence to be defined securely as a library. In this paper, we use both traditional architectural analysis and the toolkit provided by shape grammar to analyse two Late Antique domestic spaces that have been identified as libraries: Room 7 in the so-called Theodosian Palace of Stobi (North Macedonia), the provincial capital of the province of Macedonia Salutaris; and Room 10 in the villa of Fuente Álamo (Puente Genil, Spain), a Roman site located along a road that connected the coastal cities of the Mediterranean and Corduba, the provincial capital of Baetica. These paired case studies demonstrate the utility of shape grammar as a method for identifying functional spaces in archaeological contexts

Antique · Capital (architecture) · Grammar · Identification (biology) · Space (punctuation) · Subject (documents) · Architecture · Historical Architecture and Urbanism · Language and cultural evolution · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis