Matthew Notarian

Though infrequently used and largely superfluous, amphitheaters were often the most physically imposing and ideologically charged structures in a Roman city. The preponderance of extramural amphitheaters in Italy and their appearance in visual culture confirm they were potent markers of urban life and civic status. This paper contextualizes Tibur's imperial amphitheater within the Roman suburbium's persistent urban sprawl and villas, especially Hadrian's Villa, using a novel GIS visibility analysis. Its apparent size from various points in the surrounding landscape is quantified within empirical and qualitative scales developed for modern visual impact assessments. The results demonstrate the amphitheater's suburban location did more than integrate Tibur's extramural growth into the older urban center. It emphasized the city's urban appearance, even from long distances, and monumentalized alternate routes to the city used by the villa-owning elite, countering the ambiguous status of a liminal city that was both Rome's annex and an autonomous municipium.

The definition and identification of urban neighbourhoods in archaeological contexts remain complex and problematic, both theoretically and empirically. As constructs with both social and spatial characteristics, their detection through material culture alone remains elusive, especially within large settlements that are incompletely excavated or preserved. Thanks to its focus upon relational ties, network analysis offers a profitable path towards untangling the complexities of urban neighbourhoods, especially with respect to their often imprecise, fuzzy boundaries. Various community detection algorithms offer mathematical solutions for partitioning large graphs into communities, but these should not be applied without careful interpretation. Two of the most widely utilized community detection algorithms based on modularity optimization, Louvain and Leiden, contain a customizable resolution parameter that is often overlooked by practitioners. This controls the density of the partitioned communities, and therefore the number identified, but it is difficult to determine the optimal value for any given network. In addition, the results of community detection algorithms vary stochastically. Reliance upon a single iteration may mask potentially significant differences between runs using even a constant resolution parameter. A recently developed algorithm, the Convex Hull of Admissible Modularity Partitions (CHAMP), is designed to overcome these complications and also generates potentially useful multiscalar network community structures. Its applicability to neighbourhood archaeology is demonstrated within three networks of Pompeian housing units based on shared public fountains. The case study examines Pompeii’s public fountains as hubs of social interaction. Given their daily frequentation by nearby inhabitants, fountains represent plausible proxies for the centres of definable neighbourhoods. It expands upon a spatial network model that connected all 2000+ external doors in the city to the 40 public fountains that were likely functional in 79 CE. Three undirected, one-mode networks were constructed in which units are linked to each other by a common fountain and weighted by the number of fountains they share. The first network connects units by the closest fountain to any external door. Since many properties had side doors within reach of different water sources, these represent potential interconnections between communities. The second and third networks use incrementally larger time to fountain thresholds (30-second and one-minute walks to any fountain, respectively) to map potential choices, also expanding social integration. The results demonstrate that innovative methods for assessing the output of community detection algorithms offer new modes of analysis that are applicable not just to neighbourhood archaeology, but any archaeological network analysis that uses graph partitioning.

The transport of water from street fountains into living spaces was tedious but essential labor that impacted the health and social integration of subelite populations, yet it remains understudied in work on Pompeii’s public water system. This article uses spatial network analysis to demographically model public fountain use at a unit-level scale. Dynamic neighborhoods are identified using least-cost routes between every external door and fountain in the city. Maximum and minimum ranges of labor and water accessibility are quantified by total daily time and energy fetching water per household, aggregate pedestrian traffic to fountains, and fountain crowding or underuse. Data are contextualized within disruptions to the water system from seismic events in the city’s final decades, the contributions of cistern and private water lines to daily needs, and comparative and primary textual evidence for the socioeconomic status and well-being of water fetchers. The results expose disproportionate inequality at the system’s peripheries, although most residents enjoyed good water access. Moreover, they reconstruct the scale of labor of marginalized sectors of Roman society that is underrepresented in textual and artistic sources, offering quantifiable comparanda for further studies on water accessibility in antiquity.