There is a long-standing view that, in the Roman world, transport by sea and river was very much cheaper than by land. Previous analyses of transport costs have relied primarily on a few surviving historical records, notably the Edict on Maximum Prices issued by Diocletian in 301 CE. Here we outline an alternative method for deriving relative costs of transportation by different modes using materials recovered in archaeological excavations. We apply this to the distribution of Late Romano-British pottery (c. 250–400 CE) to calculate the cost ratios of transportation by road, river and sea to rural settlements and towns in lowland Britannia. The analysis suggests a best fit cost ratio of road to rivers and sea of 1:3:4 (i.e. transport by road was three times as costly as by river and four times that by sea), with 95% confidence interval of roads to rivers 1:1–5 and roads to sea of 1:1–9. These values are broadly consistent with transport cost ratios of 1:4:8 in England in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the country's transport network had reached a degree of integration comparable with late Roman Britain.

中文翻译：

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通过不同方式运输货物的成本：罗马晚期英国陶器运动的案例研究


长期以来，人们认为，在罗马世界，海运和内河运输比陆路运输便宜得多。以前对运输成本的分析主要依赖于一些幸存的历史记录，尤其是戴克里先在公元 301 年颁布的《最高价格法令》。在这里，我们概述了一种使用考古发掘中回收的材料通过不同方式得出相对运输成本的替代方法。我们将其应用于晚期罗马-不列颠陶器（约公元 250-400 年）的分销，以计算通过公路、河流和海上运输到低地不列颠尼亚农村定居点和城镇的成本比率。分析表明，公路与河流和海洋的最佳拟合成本比为 1：3：4（即公路运输成本是河流运输的三倍，海运的四倍），公路到河流的 95% 置信区间为 1：1-5，公路到海洋的置信区间为 1：1-9。这些值与 14 世纪上半叶英格兰 1：4：8 的运输成本比大体一致，当时该国的运输网络已经达到了与罗马晚期英国相当的一体化程度。