WERE ROMAN ROADS TOO STRAIGHT?

WERE ROMAN ROADS TOO STRAIGHT? This article describes how a lost Roman frontier road has been found in the Netherlands. It is thought that the road was used for trade as well as military purposes. The Roman Empire owed a lot of its success as an empire and as an integrated economy to its roads. John Maddox Roberts, in his mysteries set in ancient Rome, more than once describes a Roman road as a fifteen foot high stone wall sunk into the ground. How did the location of some Roman roads get lost? My daughter Annalisa tells me of the speculation in THE REAL MIDDLE EARTH by Brian Bates that some non-Roman peoples did not maintain the Roman roads after the Roman Empire fell because they rejected the Roman lifestyle. The Roman roads were too straight and severe. They preferred less good roads that curved along hills because they liked to live in forests and be closer to nature. Stone villas were left uninhabited for wooden huts. This review rejects the speculation. My son Nick gave me for Christmas THE BARBARIANS SPEAK by Peter Wells, which argues that archaeological evidence shows cultural resistance by non-Roman frontier peoples to Roman ways (which would support the idea that the non-Romans deliberately abandoned the roads rather than losing the skills to maintain them). This review thinks that the archaeological evidence is inconclusive. Maybe the additional information on road maintenance will shed some light on when these roads were abandoned.