Abstract

Gallo-Roman theaters—a group of buildings constructed between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE in Rome’s northwestern provinces—are difficult to typologize because they exhibit numerous non-canonical architectural features. Architectural historians have traditionally relied on qualitative description to characterize these theaters’ irregular ground plans, but this method is limiting when drawing comparisons across a large corpus of buildings. Geometric morphometrics, an approach that represents shapes as coordinate scatters for statistical analysis, can overcome some of these limitations. By digitizing a set of plans using geometric morphometrics software and then running a series of statistical tests on the morphometric dataset, I identify several theater shape clusters that appear to correspond geographically to major watersheds in the Roman Northwest. I argue that these clusters are plausibly explained as products of regional communities of architectural practice that developed around waterways as communicative arteries.

The speaker will be online, but everyone is welcome to join us in-person at the Faculty of Classics for the talk. Link to register online is here: “https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/feS71pMITV6B56t053N7Sw#/registration”