SIMREC: Simulating Roman economies (Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship)

SIMREC (Simulating Roman Economies) is an interdisciplinary project that explores the most hotly debated questions about the Roman economy: was the Roman Imperial trade market equally integrated as nowadays? How important were social networks for structuring this flow of information? It addresses two methodological issues currently preventing scholars from answering these questions: limited use of archaeological big data and the lack of quantitative comparisons of complex hypotheses. SIMREC combines recent advances in computational network science and simulation methods with increasingly available archaeological big datasets.