Coordinated Decisions and Unbalanced Power. How Latin Cities Shaped Their Terrestrial Transportation Network

Abstract

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.

Modelling terrestrial route networks to understand inter-polity interactions (southern Etruria, 950-500 BC)

“…A good example of this is Iron Age Latium vetus, a region neighboring southern Etruria which we addressed in a recent study (Fulminante et al, 2017). To attain a satisfactory reproduction of the main features of empirical road network, we had to modify model EE by including a tunable amount of rich-get-richer bias.…”

Modelling of Pathways and Movement Networks in Archaeology: An Overview of Current Approaches

“…Path modelling routines in GIS are not very efficient for network (re)construction since they do not allow for simultaneously connecting multiple nodes on the basis of standardized criteria. Commonly used and effective network construction techniques limit the number of allowed connections on the basis of distance and/or the number of closest neighbours (see Gorenflo and Bell 1991;Jiménez Badillo 2004;Rivers et al 2013;Groenhuijzen and Verhagen 2017;Fulminante et al 2017). This limitation is necessary in order to prevent the creation of spurious connections, since direct links from everywhere to everywhere are not realistic.…”

“…As far as we can tell, similar studies attempting to establish the relative importance of routes are lacking. Fulminante et al (2017), however, present a straightforward method to compare modelled networks to observed ones by taking into account the differences in network descriptors.…”

Formal Modelling Approaches to Complexity Science in Roman Studies: A Manifesto

“…Potential for Roman Studies: Network science has been used to explore large datasets of Roman tableware distributions (Brughmans 2010;, to study and model Roman transport systems (Graham 2006b;Isaksen 2007;Scheidel 2014;Fulminante et al 2017), to study the social networks revealed by Cicero's letters (Alexander and Danowski 1990), the spread of cults (Collar 2013), and to explore the degree of Roman imperial economic integration (Graham and Weingart 2015;Brughmans and Poblome 2016b). In these applications, the representation of Roman datasets as networks is a particularly common approach.…”