LAUSR

Abstract Remains of the Roman empire are numerous and spread out all around the Mediterranean sea, including north Africa, central Europe and all the way to Great Britain. Through out this area there are a vast number of Roman mosaics preserved to modern day, which among other things illustrates figurative motifs. As often noted before, the sophistication that characterizes these figurative motifs is quite remarkable. These motifs have been in the focus of a large amount of research articles and projects for quite some years. In addition to these figurative motifs there are geometrical motifs and patterns paved in the mosaics. These geometrical patterns have not to the same extent been analysed. On the contrary, they have often been neglected, with some exceptions. One type of geometrical patterns is interlaced patterns often used as borders and frames in the mosaics. These have in an even larger extent been neglected in the studies of Roman mosaics, in fact, analyses are rather rare. The illustrations of interlaced patterns in the Roman mosaics is an important part of the historical development and use of knots, links and knotworks as decorative patterns. A fair amount of these knotworks are based on rather simple mathematical principles. We provide an overview of the current research on geometrical patterns and give an introductory analysis of interlaced patterns in the Roman mosaics using a mathematical approach. Such an approach gives us a formalized classification scheme and a unified terminology for knots and links, regardless of medium, thus it is possible to further extend the analysis to other media than mosaics.