Who lived in that Roman house? Computational analysis on the domestic space to identify a new hybrid house in the Roman Empire

Abstract

One important part of ancient urbanism studies has been focused on analysing the typology and evolution of ‘private’ house. Part of these particular buildings with both public and private functions evolved over time, showing the different necessities of the society in each period. The Tetrastylon project aims to solve a surprising issue related to an often poorly identified Roman house. Under the identification of atrium house, two different typologies with important social significance divergences have been merged. On the one hand, researchers have identified the canonical axial Roman house (with some small variations due to urbanistic evolutions) with an open court (atrium). On the other hand, under the classification of atrium house, scholars have also identified another domestic structure which is built around an atrium, but following a Greek scheme of housing. This typology of Roman house, which chronologically appeared after the influence of the classic atrium house has only been detected in Roman cities with a Greek background. The project Tetrastylon is focused on the Magna Grecia and Sicily in the last centuries of Republican time, when many of the Greek colonies became Roman cities or were Roman focus. This area of the Roman Empire is a good goal in order to analyse an important number of these buildings and the result of changing a Greek peristyle for an atrium into a Hellenistic scheme of house. Finally, this typology is also usually confused with the Greek peristyle house as the architectural structures are similar, and the main difference is the morphology of the open space. To clearly identify this typology, conceptually localized between the Greek peristyle and the Roman atrium house, this project has used several archaeological analyses on the three types of dwellings. However, one of the methodological approaches of Tetrastylon has been designed to use computational models for analysing the structure and functioning of this ‘new’ typology. For this reason, in this paper, we present a combination of Space Syntax, axial maps and visibility relational models applied in all domestic structures with the purpose of finding crucial and unquestionable differences between those building models. The results of these techniques have generated new data that complement the archaeological and historical information about these houses, offering a new perspective about the social behaviour of their owners as well as the complexity of Roman urbanism.