Presents papers resulting from the EPNet project (Production and Distribution of Food during the Roman Empire: Economic and Political Dynamics) which aimed to investigate existing hypotheses about the Roman economy in order to understand which products were distributed through the different geographical regions of the empire, and in which periods.
This book considers mobility in Antiquity in its broadest sense from a multidisciplinary perspective. Although mobility is always present in studies of exchange and cultural diffusion, here it is discussed as a key feature of societies, inherent to their functioning and where cultural, social and economic processes meet.
This book focuses on luxonomics, or the economy of luxury in Roman times, and how its study is an element that is essential to understanding the history of the period. Organised in chronological order, the evolution of the luxury economy is divided into areas of consumption, production, and criticism.
'Arqueologia y Techne' presenta varios trabajos realizados por los miembros del equipo del proyecto europeo EPNet (Produccion y distribucion de alimentos durante el Imperio Romano: Dinamica economica y politica; ERC Advanced Grant 2013-ADG 340828). Aqui se publican diversas investigaciones y resultados interdisciplinarios. El objetivo principal del proyecto EPNet era utilizar herramientas formales para falsificar las hipotesis existentes sobre la economia romana para comprender que productos, en que periodos, se distribuyeron a traves de las diferentes regiones geograficas. Tambien se destaca el papel que desempenaban los diferentes agentes politicos y economicos en el control de los productos y las redes comerciales.
Outgrowth of a session organized for the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in St. Louis, Mo., in 2010. Cf. acknowledgments.
This open access book demonstrates the application of simulation modelling and network analysis techniques in the field of Roman studies. It summarizes and discusses the results of a 5-year research project carried out by the editors that aimed to apply spatial dynamical modelling to reconstruct and understand the socio-economic development of the Dutch part of the Roman frontier (limes) zone, in particular the agrarian economy and the related development of settlement patterns and transport networks in the area. The project papers are accompanied by invited chapters presenting case studies and reflections from other parts of the Roman Empire focusing on the themes of subsistence economy, demography, transport and mobility, and socio-economic networks in the Roman period. The book shows the added value of state-of-the-art computer modelling techniques and bridges computational and conventional approaches. Topics that will be of particular interest to archaeologists are the question of (forced) surplus production, the demographic and economic effects of the Roman occupation on the local population, and the structuring of transport networks and settlement patterns. For modellers, issues of sensitivity analysis and validation of modelling results are specifically addressed. This book will appeal to students and researchers working in the computational humanities and social sciences, in particular, archaeology and ancient history.
This volume presents epigraphic research using digital and computational tools, comparing the outcomes of both well-established and newer projects to consider the most innovative investigative trends. Papers consider open-access databases, SfM Photogrammetry and Digital Image Modelling applied to textual restoration, Linked Open Data, and more.
Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines, however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.
