Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#51

Post by tonymet » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

metiscus wrote: post #38

tonymet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have there been any interesting revelations in understanding the history of the Roman Empire in the past 30 years? Newer manuscripts or artifacts discovered ?

The short answer is yes. Successo-Terra has done a lot of work on the preroman history of Italy quite recently. https://www.successoterra.net/en The Vesuvius scrolls have been partially decoded with some interesting results. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-students-dec... The Vindolanda tablets are constantly being worked on as well https://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/07/roman-tablets-unearthe...

This was really insightful thanks!

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#52

Post by bshivarthy » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

this is very cool

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#53

Post by metiscus » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

1e1a wrote: post #47

This is very cool, but unfortunately it's hard to get a sense of what the actual spatial distribution of people looks like when nearby nodes are grouped into larger dots that obscure the local structure.

That is largely an artifact of the source data, sadly. I place the dots where they were found, if the dataset has that information, otherwise I georef them back to the "findsite" in the data, which aggregates many finds at one place. A lot of these were found in the 1800s and just dont have good find lla data.

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#54

Post by tosti » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

metiscus wrote: post #25

tosti wrote: post #23

The map is woefully inaccurate, because it depicts present-day topology. See e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Peace_of... From: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_European_history

The map tiles themselves come from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Which you can find here. https://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/

That's wrong, too. Seeing reclaimed land in there is a clear sign.

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#55

Post by apiorno » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

nice!

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#56

Post by retmarut » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 12:37 PM UTC

I spent more time on this than I should have! WELL DONE.

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#57

Post by Etymon » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

Five hundred thousand inscriptions and most of the names haven't been seen for centuries. A lovely thing to have built.

Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

#58

Post by 1e1a » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 12:10 AM UTC

metiscus wrote: post #53

1e1a wrote: post #47

This is very cool, but unfortunately it's hard to get a sense of what the actual spatial distribution of people looks like when nearby nodes are grouped into larger dots that obscure the local structure.

That is largely an artifact of the source data, sadly. I place the dots where they were found, if the dataset has that information, otherwise I georef them back to the "findsite" in the data, which aggregates many finds at one place. A lot of these were found in the 1800s and just dont have good find lla data.

Ah, I was referring to the zoom-level-dependent clustering, which I find makes it hard to see the distribution of points when zoomed out all the way. There's still quite a bit of detail even with many of the points sharing the same location.