Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal

<P>The principal aims of <I>Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire</I> are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Empire and to explain why these systems looked the way they did.</P><P></P><P>While some chapters focus on settlements that were cities or towns from a juridical point of view, the implications of using a purely functional definition of towns are also explored. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities belonging to various size brackets, economic relationships between self-governing cities and their territories and the role of cities as nodes in road systems and maritime networks. In addition, it is argued that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portugal were poly-centric rather than based on a single urban centre.</P><P></P><P>The volume will be of interest to anyone working on Roman urbanism as well as those interested in the Iberian Peninsula in the Roman period.</P>