Academic Reading — All-Types Test 22

Reading passage

The archaeology of ancient roads A The lines that ancient roads once traced across the landscape have a curious habit of surviving long after the empires that built them have crumbled. A road is, at first glance, one of the most perishable of monuments: unlike a temple or a tomb, it exists to be worn down, and centuries of cart wheels, marching feet and weather ought to erase it entirely. Yet the archaeology of ancient roads has shown that these routes are remarkably persistent. A well-made road reshapes the ground beneath it, compacts the soil, alters drainage and leaves a scar that ploughing and rebuilding rarely remove completely. For this reason the study of old roads has become one of the most productive ways of reading the deep history of a region. B Finding a buried road, however, is seldom a matter of simply digging where one expects it to be. The most striking advances have come from techniques that survey the land from a distance. Aerial photographs taken in the low light of early morning can reveal, as faint ridges and shadows, the raised bank of a road that is invisible to anyone standing on it. More recently, a laser-based method known as lidar, mounted on a light aircraft, has allowed surveyors to strip away vegetation from their images and expose the bare shape of the ground below. In one heavily forested valley, a team using this approach mapped an entire network of paved routes that had lain hidden under the trees for well over a thousand years. Even variations in the growth of a farmer's crops can betray what lies beneath: cereals rooted over a buried stone surface ripen at a slightly different rate from those in the surrounding soil, painting the outline of a lost road in subtly contrasting shades of green and gold. Such methods do not replace the spade, but they tell the excavator where to place it. C What a road is made of turns out to be a reliable guide to who made it and why. The grandest imperial highways were engineered in distinct layers: a foundation of large stones, then packed gravel, and finally a carefully cambered surface designed to shed rainwater to ditches on either side. A humble country track, by contrast, might be no more than a strip of beaten earth that gradually sank below the level of the surrounding fields. Between these extremes lay a whole spectrum of construction, and the cross-section revealed by a trench cut through a road can tell an archaeologist a great deal about the resources and the ambitions of its builders. A surface of imported stone, for instance, implies an authority wealthy enough to move heavy materials over long distances. D Roads were rarely built for a single purpose, and disentangling their functions is part of the archaeologist's task. Some were plainly military, driven in near-straight lines across difficult country so that troops could be moved with maximum speed; the comfort of ordinary travellers was clearly a secondary consideration. Others followed gentler, winding courses that hugged the contours of the land, suggesting routes shaped over generations by traders and herders rather than imposed by a central power. The goods that travelled along a road can sometimes be traced through what was dropped or discarded beside it. Coins, broken pottery and the worn remains of way-stations accumulate along busy routes, and the distribution of such finds allows scholars to reconstruct patterns of trade that no written record preserves. E Perhaps the most valuable lesson to emerge from this field is how completely a road can outlive its original meaning. A route first cut for one purpose is regularly adopted for another, and the line laid down by ancient engineers frequently dictates where later generations choose to travel. Modern surveys have shown that a surprising number of present-day roads and boundaries still follow alignments set down two thousand years ago, even where every trace of the original surface has vanished. The road, in other words, is not merely a thing that people once used; it is a decision about how a landscape should be crossed, and such decisions, once made, prove astonishingly hard to unmake.