Roman bazaar or market economy? Explaining tableware distributions through computational modelling

Brughmans, Tom; Poblome, Jeroen

doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.35

Cited by 67 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…The study of clay lamps is related to the researches in broad framework of Roman pottery, Craft and Commerce in the Roman Empire. In this sense, aligned with the most recent research in archaeological ceramics (Brughmans and Poblome 2016, Bes 2015, Carrignon 2015. The question of how frequent and intense the economic contacts would be in past, in addition to the specific case studied, is a topic of growing interest, fostering data sets that include archaeological, epigraphic, and written sources.…”

Section: Network Analysis and Archeologymentioning

confidence: 81%

Emerging distribution networks of Roman pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean: the sigillata clay lamps of Proconsular Africa

Bastos

2019

Herodoto

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This paper surveys the use of Network Science, especially the role of ArchaeologicalNetworks to the study of Archeology and Ancient History. Networkthinking and network science are valuable methodologies and analytical techniquesto apply to the study clay lamps in the framework of Roman economy.The recent application of network analysis in Antiquity and Archaeology hasdemonstrated that there are a variety of approaches to recognizing networkpatterns or thinking about phenomena as products of networked processes.Provincial connectivity is one of the most debated aspects of Roman economics,and ceramic consumption patterns in the interior and coastal regions ofAfrica Proconsularis have proven to be very different. The dominant tendencyto turn to the communities formed and structured around native identities,especially those based in the major urban centers and larger areas, seems toestablish itself as an argument for the economy and exchanges of the RomanEmpire. This types of networks helped to spread ideas and religious symbolsthrough clay lamps. Africa Proconsular demonstrates evidence that the ceramicworkshops emerged as networks in order to established themselves seekingto meet the Mediterranean demand and religious consumption.

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Section: Network Analysis and Archeologymentioning

confidence: 81%

Emerging distribution networks of Roman pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean: the sigillata clay lamps of Proconsular Africa

Bastos

2019

Herodoto

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“…This view is understandable given the fragmentary and time-averaged nature of the archaeological record. Instead, the approach used here treats social networks as dynamical systems with continuous flows of matter, information, and energy in constant interaction with their ecological and social environments (Brughmans and Poblome 2016;Crabtree 2015). Improved representations of social and biophysical dynamics will not only enhance understanding of the empirical settlement patterning in the archaeological record, but will also facilitate future cross-cultural and interregional comparisons by providing a shared set of questions and methodological tools for answering them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trade, migration, and the dynamics of spatial interaction

Gauthier¹

2019

Preprint

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Archaeological settlement patterns are the physical remains of complex webs of human decision-making and social interaction. Entropy-maximizing spatial interaction models are a means of building parsimonious models that average over much of this small-scale complexity, while maintaining key large-scale structural features. Dynamic social interaction models extend this approach by allowing archaeologists to explore the co-evolution of human settlement systems and the networks of interaction that drive them. Yet, such models are often imprecise, relying on generalized notions of settlement "influence" and "attractiveness" rather than concrete material flows of goods and people. Here, I present a dis-aggregated spatial interaction model that explicitly resolves trade and migration flows and their combined influence on settlement growth and decline. I explore how the balance of costs and benefits of each type of interaction influence long-term settlement patterns. I find trade flows are the strongest determinant of equilibrium settlement structure, and that migration flows play a more transient role in balancing site hierarchies. This model illustrates how the broad toolkit for spatial interaction modeling developed in geography and economics can increase the precision of quantitative theory building in archaeology, and provides a road-map for connecting mechanistic models to the empirical archaeological record.

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“…Robust patterns in the geographical spread of such archaeological data can be explored as emerging from theorised Roman economic systems with varying degrees of integration (e.g. Graham and Weingart 2015;Brughmans and Poblome 2016a;2016b).…”

Section: Key Complexity Science Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Roman example: In the MERCURY model, Brughmans and Poblome (2016a;2016b) constructed an ABM consisting of traders trading goods within and across markets. By changing the properties of the commercial network (from well-connected within markets to well-connected between markets) they showed that only in scenarios where the market was well integrated (i.e., traders had access to contacts from outside their immediate surroundings) the resulting pattern of distribution of goods matched the archaeologically attested spatio-temporal trends in the distribution of Terra Sigillata in the Roman East.…”

Section: Agent-based Modelling Lead Author: Iza Romanowskamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: Network Science Lead Author: Tom Brughmansmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Brughmans

Hanson

Mandich

et al. 2019

Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal

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Complexity science refers to the theoretical research perspectives and the formal modelling tools designed to study complex systems. A complex system consists of separate entities interacting following a set of (often simple) rules that collectively give rise to unexpected patterns featuring vastly different properties than the entities that produced them. In recent years a number of case studies have shown that such approaches have great potential for furthering our understanding of the past phenomena explored in Roman Studies. We argue complexity science and formal modelling have great potential for Roman Studies by offering four key advantages: (1) the ability to deal with emergent properties in complex Roman systems; (2) the means to formally specify theories about past Roman phenomena; (3) the power to test aspects of these theories as hypotheses using formal modelling approaches; and (4) the capacity to do all of this in a transparent, reproducible, and cumulative scientific framework. We present a ten-point manifesto that articulates arguments for the more common use in Roman Studies of perspectives, concepts and tools from the broader field of complexity science, which are complementary to empirical inductive approaches. There will be a need for constant constructive collaboration between Romanists with diverse fields of expertise in order to usefully embed complexity science and formal modelling in Roman Studies.

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Roman bazaar or market economy? Explaining tableware distributions through computational modelling

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 67 publications

References 12 publications

Emerging distribution networks of Roman pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean: the sigillata clay lamps of Proconsular Africa

Emerging distribution networks of Roman pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean: the sigillata clay lamps of Proconsular Africa

Trade, migration, and the dynamics of spatial interaction

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

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