Identifier une auberge romaine. Quelques réflexions méthodologiques / Methodological Thoughts on the Identification of Roman Inns

Statio amoena Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane a cura di

Marie-Adeline Le Guennec (1, 2)

1 EFR - Ecole française de Rome
2 HiSoMA - Histoire et Sources des Mondes antiques

This paper is a contribution to the debate on stations along the Roman roads in Antiquity, in relation to the important development of historical and archaeological studies in this field over the last 20 years. During this period, considerable progress in the archaeology of road stations has been achieved through new discoveries. On a more structural level, researchers now question the equivalence which used to be systematically established between those stations and the official “cursus publicus” system. On the basis of a more balanced approach of textual and material evidence, a new consensus has recently emerged regarding the possibility for these places to have had mixed (that is both private and public) modes of administration and uses. Despite the increasing historiographical focus on these questions, the commercial establishments providing travellers with accommodation, which can be compared to modern inns, have attracted less attention: the interpretation of remains identified by archaeologists as inns is usually based on the only available synthesis on this topic, written by Swedish historian T. Kleberg in the 1930's (T. Kleberg, Hôtels, restaurants et cabarets dans l'antiquité romaine : études historiques et philologiques, Uppsala, 1957, Bibliotheca Ekmaniana, 61), which is now outdated in many aspects. This surprising lack of interest prompted me to dedicate my PhD to the commercial activity which consisted in providing travellers with various services of sojourn for money and without previous selection, in the Western Roman Antiquity. This activity led to the development of a varied Latin terminology but it is mostly associated with the term caupo, which can be considered as the typical designation of the Roman innkeeper. In textual evidence, Roman inns are ascertained in the most diverse contexts: the presence of a street or a road leading travellers to the commercial premises is often referred to as determinant in the process of choosing where to place an inn. It is then to be expected that commercial inns were frequently numbered among the facilities found in Roman road stations; hence, we have to consider how they can be identified in situ by archaeologists. In this paper, I highlight the various difficulties hampering such identification, that led me during my PhD to base my observations pertaining to the material manifestations of commercial accommodation on a sample of cases in which epigraphic or iconographic evidence, in relation to archaeological remains, ascertained the designation of the site as a commercial inn. This method allows me to compare the ways in which commercial accommodation was practised, represented and spoken of in the Roman world, thus contributing to a general definition of this activity. Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia are the main sites in which such a combination of data is to be found, a situation which can be explained by the specificities of their context of conservation. The characteristics of the inns selected in these urban contexts are compared with data from other sites, where the inn identification is based on archaeological criteria only. In this paper, I present a synthesis of this methodological approach and of the results it allowed me to achieve, in view of a more systematic confrontation with urban, periurban and rural road stations. I address the identification criteria of various commercial services provided by Pompeian inns, focusing on accommodation, food and beverage catering, mounts and vehicles reception and prostitution. Those criteria and the services to which they pertained appear nevertheless too heterogeneous, sporadic and polysemous to qualify for a Roman inn in every other archaeological context or even at the scale of the site of reference for this survey. In the end, this paper opens prospects for research on the integration of commercial inns in the more general field of accommodation along the roads of the Roman world.

Mots clés: Auberges; archéologie; Antiquité romaine

Domaines: Histoire

Marie-Adeline Le Guennec. Identifier une auberge romaine. Quelques réflexions méthodologiques / Methodological Thoughts on the Identification of Roman Inns. P. Basso; E. Zanini. Statio amoena : sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane., Archaeopress, pp.81-90, 2016. ⟨halshs-01591215⟩