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.
