What is it about?
How can archaeologists identify an ancient library when the books, shelves and furniture have disappeared? This study develops a new way of answering that question. We combine traditional archaeological analysis with “shape grammar”, a method that examines how architectural elements are arranged and connected to create particular types of space. We tested the method on two Late Antique buildings: a room in the so-called Theodosian Palace at Stobi in North Macedonia and a group of rooms in the Roman villa of Fuente Álamo in southern Spain. While the evidence from Stobi remains inconclusive, the architecture of Fuente Álamo closely follows the spatial language of known Roman libraries. Our analysis indicates that this part of the villa was deliberately designed as a private library for reading, study and the storage of books.
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Why is it important?
Private libraries played an important role in Roman elite culture, but they are extremely difficult to recognise archaeologically because books and wooden furniture rarely survive. Our study provides a more systematic method for identifying these spaces and reduces the risk of interpreting rooms as libraries simply because they resemble other uncertain examples. At Fuente Álamo, the method has allowed us to identify the oldest Roman library currently documented in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the best-preserved private libraries known from the Roman world. The discovery has attracted exceptional international interest, with coverage in more than 60 media outlets and at least ten languages.
Perspectives
What fascinated us about Fuente Álamo was that we were not simply looking for a room where somebody might have read or stored books. We wanted to know whether the architecture itself had been deliberately designed as a library. The comparison with Stobi was crucial: both spaces could plausibly have been associated with intellectual activity, but only Fuente Álamo displays the coordinated architectural features expected of a purpose-built Roman library. Even more intriguing is a fourth-century sarcophagus found nearby, which depicts scrolls, a codex and scenes associated with literary activity and may preserve an image connected with the villa’s educated elite. Together, architecture and iconography give us a rare glimpse into the intellectual identity of a Late Roman landowner.
Antonio Lopez Garcia
Universidad de Granada
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New Approaches to Identifying Roman Libraries, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, August 2026, Equinox Publishing,
DOI: 10.1558/jma.35930.
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