Ancient regional routes were vital for interactions between settlements and deeply influenced the development of past societies and their "complexification". At the same time, since any transportation infrastructure needs some level of inter-settlement cooperation to be established, they can also be regarded as an epiphenomenon of social interactions at the regional scale. Here, we propose to analyze ancient pathway networks to understand the organization of cities and villages located in a certain territory, attempting to clarify whether such organization existed and if so, how it functioned.To address such a question, we chose a quantitative approach. Adopting network science as a general framework, by means of formal models, we try to identify how the collective effort that produced the terrestrial infrastructure was directed and organized. We selected a paradigmatic case study: Iron Age southern Etruria, a very well-studied context, with detailed archaeological information about settlement patterns and an established tradition of studies on terrestrial transportation routes, perfectly suitable for testing new techniques. The results of the modelling suggest that a balanced coordinated decision-making process was shaping the route network in Etruria, a scenario which correlates well with the picture elaborated by different scholars using a more traditional technique.
The period between the beginning of the Early Iron Age and the end of the Archaic Period is a time of changes and developments in the Italian Peninsula, which led to the creation of regional ethnic and political groups and to the formation of the first citystates in Western Europe. In the present study, we focus on the evolution of terrestrial route network in the Tyrrhenian region of Latium vetus as it has been hypothesized by scholars from the archeological evidence. Our main goal is to investigate the mechanisms linking decision making processes and the structure of transportation networks. We first attempted to replicate some of its features applying three models previously elaborated for the neighboring region of Southern Etruria. Since it was not possible to attain entirely satisfactory results, we modified the model that performed better in the Etruscan region by including a tunable amount of rich-get-richer bias, which improved considerably its performance. Our results suggest that coordinated decision making with a slightly unbalanced power was responsible for the peculiar characteristics of the route network topology of Latium vetus. Moreover, the mechanism implemented by this model implies that places located at favorable positions can build on their initial advantage and get more and more powerful. This fits very well with the picture elaborated by different scholars on the nature of power balance and dynamics in this region.
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