North Street: The Widest Road in the Quarter
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
The grooves in the road are ancient traffic reports.
North Street is about 7.5 metres wide, the widest street in the reconstructed quarter. Five construction phases have been identified. Cart traces survive on exposed paving and porticoes lined the route.
Follow the wheel traces with your eyes and imagine repeated axle paths rather than one dramatic journey.
The evidence level here is excavated street with reconstructed porticoes.
Keep the early fourth century in mind: the reconstructed quarter presents a late phase of a city that had already been growing and rebuilding for centuries.
What looks like one archaeological attraction is really evidence for a city operating at several social levels at once.
One of kar-NOON-toom's strengths is that archaeology can test the attractive story against material evidence—and sometimes force us to tell a better, less convenient story.
For a visitor, the value is causal rather than chronological: this stop explains why a frontier metropolis needed this particular space, system or institution.
For someone already familiar with kar-NOON-toom, the useful detail is scale: the object in front of you belonged to a network much larger than the surviving ruin.