The seeds of commerce: A network analysis-based approach to the Romano-British transport system

Abstract

(2016) The seeds of commerce: a network analysis-based approach to the Romano-British transport system. Journal of Archaeological Science, Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31162/1/The%20seeds%20of%20commerce.%20A %20network%20analysis-based%20approach%20to%20the%20Romano-British %20transport%20system_post-print.pdf Copyright and reuse:The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. This article is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives licence and may be reused according to the conditions of the licence. For more details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Communication routes are an important subject in the study of the human past. They allowed in-teractions between communities and the dispersal of goods and ideas. Their study, therefore, can shed light on the way in which communities inhabited the landscape, related to each other and were affected by macro-regional trends. Many methods, such as archaeomorphological analysis and Least Cost Route modelling (LCR), have been devised and are routinely employed for the reconstruction of ancient routes. Their analysis in terms of communication, trade or historical significance, however, has usually been left unexplored. This is probably due to the connected nature of routes, which form communication networks: these are shaped by interconnected nodes and extend over territories surpassing the regional scale in such a way that even a change in a single node or link can affect the whole network. Consequently, the partial reconstruction of communication networks provided by the aforementioned methods does not usually allow a holistic analysis. In this paper the relatively well understood British Roman road network is employed to explore the analytical possibilities offered by a combination of Social Network Analysis, Spatial Network Analysis and spatial interpolation-based distribution analysis. The British road network has been reconstructed using published data but also a variation of LCR in which cost surfaces are derived from cultural data obtained from large-scale cultural inventories. The distribution of introduced food plants during the Roman period serve as an excellent proxy for the study of trade along the network and its historical consequences. This multi-period archaeobotanical dataset has some evident advantages to other types of material remains: archaeobotanical remains are not reused as, for example, amphorae and, accordingly, they reflect a distribution pattern based on consumption or commerce. Some of them are impor...

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