ancient transportation blog and more…

I had meant to do this for quite a while, and my mind was jogged by David Meadows’ classicarnival of today.

Budding archaeologist Kristian Minck of Denmark has a greatly informative and well illustrated blog,  Ancient Transportation: Roman wagons and beyond.  If you look at the categories, it is nicely organized and also has a separate “still running” bibliography, which however, is largely in German.

All I can contribute to the subject are photos of a reconstructed Roman travel carriage from the Romano-Germanic Museum in Cologne, Germany.  (Click on image for more views.)

This is a latish Roman carriage, bits and pieces of which were found north of Thessaloniki.

The bronze parts can be dated to around 300 A.D., according to the guide book  Das Römisch-Germanische Köln. Führer zu Museum und Stadt.  The general reconstruction is based on a spolia relief  in Maria Saal in Kärnten (Carinthia) in Austria.  This page is in German; scroll down to the photo.  The original reconstruction was attempted in Paris in 1904, the current one is of 1973.

Kristian is also starting a Water Transport category, and there I'll have more images to contribute, subject of a future blog.

More on spolia.  JSTOR (limited access) has Roman Architectural Spolia, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 145, No. 2. (Jun., 2001), pp. 138-161.