Highlights on Spanish Astrophysics IX, Proceedings of the XII Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society held on July 18 – 22, 2016, in Bilbao, Spain. S. Arribas, A. Alonso-Herrero, F. Figueras, C. Hernández-Monteagudo, A. Sánchez-Lavega, S. Pérez-Hoyos (eds.) Astronomy in towns? An archaeoastronomical approach to the Roman urbanism Andrea Rodr´ ıguez-Ant´ on 12 , Juan Antonio Belmonte 12 , and A. C´ esar Gonz´ alez-Garc´ ıa 3 1 Instituto de Astrof´ ısica de Canarias (IAC), E-38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 2 Universidad de La Laguna, Dpto. Astrof´ ısica, E-38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 3 Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, Incipit-CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, 15704, Spain Abstract Although the final definition of Archaeoastronomy is still under debate, what is clear is that this discipline offers a different approach to the knowledge of ancient cultures than traditional archaeology has done so far. Archaeoastronomy considers the sky as an insepa- rabe part of the environment and thus an element of the transformed landscape with highly symbolic content. In the case of the Roman culture, the great colonizing activity involved continuous spatial transformations and the skyscape should be considered as a piece of the created urbanized spaces. For this reason, a number of fieldwork campaigns were conducted in several Roman cities across different regions of the ancient Roman Empire in order to study the configuration of those landscapes and the possible integration of the sky during the buiding processes. At the present, our group has the largest sample of orientations of Roman settlements so far, and here it is shown the preliminary results of an statistical anal- ysis which may offer new answers to the various still open questions in Roman urbanism, often faced from conservative views. 1 Introduction The interest in understanding the celestial motions and to unveil the mysteries of the universe has contributed to the emergence of uncountable myths, but also has encouraged time reck- oning systems and, of course, astronomy in the modern sense. From a political and religious points of view, the study of the cosmic events helped humans to create time patterns and, consequently, cultural ones. A quote in Ecclesiastes [3:1] may reflect this idea: ’For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven’. In the vast Roman Empire, the existence of a common and well-stablished calendar that marked remarkable days in the year, contributed to create a feeling of unity among settled territories. Dates as the day of the traditional foundation of Rome by Romulus, established ‘timemarks’ for performing diverse 760