A study for the understanding of the Roman pavement design criteria

The authors present the suggestive hypothesis that Romans possessed specific and specialized pavement design criteria, from which the most appropriate construction techniques and the majestic road infrastructures descend. From a back-analysis of some road pavements, it emerged that there is a good correspondence between thicknesses and materials selection used by Romans and those arising from the calculation by analytic methods introduced only in the modern age. In this paper, some considerations, from the point of view of road engineer, were presented; these could be usefully shared with the researchers in the fields of cultural heritage and archeology in order to identify both soils and road pavement materials sampling and classification systems for a new perspective of scientific speculation. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.