(August 18, 2015 at 6:34 pm)Little lunch Wrote: Those Romans were so ahead of the times.
Would love to read a condensed version but two volumes sounds a bit off putting. :-)
They are actually quite slim. Margery wrote them in post-war Britain. He was an affluent man with time on his hands and spent most of the 1950's studying maps and travelling around when petrol rations allowed to conduct amateur archaeological surveys on the lines of suspected Roman roads. He is credited with finding hundreds of miles of them. His techniques are still considered viable by modern archaeologists, although they have been surpassed by modern methods like aerial survey and geophysics. He did make some bad mistakes though, but for an amateur he is loved by Romanists like myself in the UK.
To this day Roman archaeologists in Britain still refer to roman roads by the numbering system that Margary introduced, but as a kind of 'in-joke' they add the preface 'M"' to his numbers. This is funny because (for you American readers) the British highway system of the fastest roads are called Motorways and are prefaced by the letter M. For instance, the notorious M25 is the London orbital motorway, or as we like to call it, Europe's biggest carpark.
