Ciudades romanas de la Provincia Baetica : una valoración a partir del proyecto CVB.
In: Hispania Antigua. Arqueológica: 14, 2022
DOI: 10.48255/9788891327734.25
The project about the corpus of Roman cities of Baetica, called Corpus Vrbium Baeticarum, which implies the study of the urban world of the entire Province of Baetica, is conceived from an integral vision of the phenomenon. According to this reasoning, this project deals with the study of the main lines of research on these cities, literary sources, epigraphy, numismatics, public and private architecture, sculpture and the funerary world, among others. The conception and editing of this enormous project find its most direct precedent and inspiration in the great compilation works which, over the last 150 years, have collated the knowledge of all the cities, towns, and tribes of the different Roman provinces. In this case, the CVB project goes on with the implementations made possible by new technologies and the perspective offered by time in the presence of new discoveries and research, of works such as those of E. Desjardins, Géographie de la Gaule Romaine, H. Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, or the famous one of A. Tovar and somehow initiated by Schulten Iberische Landeskunden with its three volumes, one for each Province Baetica, Lusitania and Tarraconensis, the latter published posthumously. It is in the first volume of this now classic work that this corpus finds its most direct pioneer.
With all the above mentioned, from this perspective, it is as of today the most updated and complete compilation regarding the knowledge on the cities of the Baetica Province which, thanks to the web application developed, makes it possible in a novel way to access a heterogeneous and varied range of information on each of the cities under analysis (http://uhu.es/CVB/). In short, in the presentation of the existing knowledge on the Roman cities of Baetica lies the spirit and philosophy that gave rise to this research: to compile and analyse all the existing information on the Baetica cities and synthesise it into working documents that provide researchers interested in the subject with a unified, manageable, and updated source of data.
Perhaps it is in this last point where one of the greatest attractions of the systematisation of the information lies, given that, in addition to the different general and monographic publications on various topics of the Baetica urban world, it will be possible to access in a more detailed way to the current information on each city and each of the major subjects to analyse. Besides this added value, the development of this web application with the constant implementation of possible new data being added during current research, fortuitous discoveries, or newscientific publications, allows the information in the corpus to be updated, being better than paper printing. This is the reason why this catalogue on the urban world has a marked temporal projection, becoming a reference repertoire as it would be constantly updated. In addition to the first approach of this project, the methodological development, and the processing of the information, the contributions to knowledge about the urban Baetica have seen an important qualitative leap. Numerous contributions have been made to different lines of research, such as literary sources, which have allowed a review and discussion of interesting debates about reductions, author quotations, etc. No less interesting is the important role played by numismatic studies, which have brought to light important considerations on the monetary issues of the Republican period and the beginning of the Empire, identifying new mints, or clarifying details of other lesser-known ones. Along the same lines, we can bring up the contributions of the studies on forensic public architecture, which have made it possible to establish a series of provincial characteristics in a diachronic key which, although being part of the trends of each imperial period, marked their development in the province. Similar features can be observed in the case of public buildings such as thermal baths, ludi, etc. The syntheses carried out on domestic architecture have also been important, with the identification of different models that respond to different causes, as in the case of the implementation of the atrium model in the Early Imperial period. This is only a part of the final considerations of a comprehensive study in its conception and novel in its transposition through the new technologies, finding in the computing environment a dynamic expression and agile consultation.
Thus, this corpus was conceived with a practical nature in its development and subsequent use for the maximum benefit of the scientific and academic community. In line with this idea, the corpus is designed with a perspective of constant implementation, with an uninterrupted projection throughout the time that will complete any new developments and discoveries of current and future research; a project, therefore, that will remain operative and updated over time.