Latin Milestones of the Roman Empire (LIME)

The Latin Milestones of the Roman Empire (LIME) dataset is a curated and enriched subset of the Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire (LIRE) dataset, focused exclusively on Roman milestone inscriptions (miliaria) in Latin. It has been compiled as part of the doctoral research of Mathias Holland Johansen at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, on the changing investment into Roman infrastructure over the course of the Empire. Research context LIME was built to study Roman infrastructure investment with milestones as an economic proxy. The underlying premise is that the chronological and quantitative distribution of milestone inscriptions — recording the construction, repair, reinforcement, or remaking of roads and bridges — can be used as an indirect indicator of the scale of financial activity stimulated by central and local authorities across the Empire. Infrastructure work mobilised significant labour, materials, and supply chains, and patterns in epigraphic evidence for such work can, all else being equal, illuminate fluctuations in state and regional economic investment. The dataset is therefore designed to support quantitative epigraphic analysis of when, where, and what kind of infrastructural work was carried out, and by whom. Contents The dataset consists of 8,379 Latin milestone inscriptions from across the Roman Empire, covering the chronological range from the Republican period to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the entirety of the imperial geographic extent. Each inscription is described by 184 attributes, distributed across: 72 columns of substantive information on the milestone, its location, dating, material, inscription text, road and agent attributes, types of action recorded (e.g. munit, restituit, refecit, reparavit, fecit, posuit), and infrastructural objects mentioned (road, bridge, embankment, tunnel, drained marsh, miliaria). 112 columns indicating the named presence on each milestone of individual Roman emperors and Republican magistrates (Consul, Aedile, Praetor, Proconsul), as well as imperial dynasties. Spatial information is provided as decimal Latitude and Longitude coordinates, inherited from LIRE and corrected where necessary. Chronological information is given both as raw date ranges (Dating_fro, Dating_to, Date_not_b, Date_not_a, Raw_dating) and as a categorical mapping into Reece Periods (columns Reece Period 1 through Reece Period 4) to support comparative analysis with other categories of Roman material culture, particularly coin finds, in the wider doctoral project. A detailed codebook describing every column is included in this release. Provenance and enrichment The base records were extracted from the LIRE v3.0 dataset, which itself aggregates the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH) and the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby (EDCS). The LIRE compilation was created by the Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean (SDAM) project at Aarhus University (Kaše, Heřmánková, and Sobotková). LIME builds on this foundation by: Restricting the dataset to Latin milestone inscriptions; Visually inspecting each record and extracting structured information from the inscription text into dedicated columns; Correcting provincial attributions where the original assignment did not match the actual findspot; Reformatting coordinate values where transfer artefacts had affected them; Adding new datings to records where none existed, or revising existing datings on the basis of the inscription text (these are flagged in the Date by MHJ column); Adding analytical columns recording named agents, military units, social ranks, titles, named provinces of office, action verbs, the type of infrastructure worked on, and the presence of individual emperors. The original LIRE dataset and its creators are acknowledged here and formally referenced via DOI in the related identifiers of this record. File formats This initial release (v1.0) is published as a single CSV file for maximum interoperability: LIME_v1-0.csv — the full dataset (8,379 rows × 184 columns) LIME_codebook.csv — column-by-column documentation Additional formats (Parquet, GeoJSON) are planned for future versions to support geospatial and large-scale computational workflows. How to cite Please cite this dataset using the DOI assigned by Zenodo and listed in the "Citation" section of this record. Disclaimer The original epigraphic data is provided by third parties (EDH and EDCS) via the LIRE aggregation. The author of LIME has not generated the underlying inscription readings and does not vouch for the accuracy of the editiones principes. As discussed in the doctoral project description, the evidentiary value of milestone inscriptions — particularly for the period after AD 235 — is itself a matter of scholarly debate, given the formulaic nature of the genre and the political functions that milestones served alongside their commemorative-infrastructural ones. Users are encouraged to consult the primary epigraphic publications listed in the publicatio column for any case in which precise textual accuracy is critical. Funding and acknowledgements This work was carried out as part of doctoral research at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, in the programme Culture and Society in Antiquity. No external grant funding is associated with this release. The author gratefully acknowledges the work of the LIRE team (Vojtěch Kaše, Petra Heřmánková, and Adéla Sobotková) and the EDH and EDCS projects, without which this enriched subset would not have been possible.