There is a conference dedicated to the study of the Roman Limes, you know, that region between the Roman Empire and “the rest”. My colleagues and I love this as a study region for exploring interactions but also for the highly specialised investments by the Roman government and the impacts this had on the people living in this border zone. And of course we do this with computers.
We will host a session on this at the Limes conference which will be held 22-28 August 2021 in Nijmegen.
31 Simulating the Limes. Challenges to computational modelling in Roman Studies
Philip Verhagen
Affiliation: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Session Abstract: The increasing availability of large digital data sets requires archaeologists and historians to develop or adopt new analytical tools in order to detect and understand socio- economic and cultural patterns and to compare these at wider spatial and temporal scales. Simulation and other types of computational modelling are rapidly becoming a key instruments for this type of research. They are used to bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and archaeological evidence. These models can be of an exploratory nature, or attempt to closely emulate historical dynamics, and enable us to understand the mechanisms underlying, for example, e.g. population changes or economic systems.
Despite having access to large amounts of high-quality data, Roman studies have so far been relatively slow in adopting computational modelling, and Limes studies are no exception. The Limes is a particular case since each border region has its own characteristics, environmental setting, cultural background and specific relationship with the ‘core’ but also shares common features derived from being at the ‘outskirts’ of political, economic and cultural life. The interaction between these two dimensions is highly complex. Thus, the Limes constitutes an arena where formal modelling methods have particularly high potential. However, key challenges to this approach are i) the proper integration of archaeological and historical data sets; ii) a good understanding of what proxies to use, and iii) the computational power needed for modelling at larger scales.
We invite papers that showcase examples of modelling within the broader thematic setting of the Limes, taking these challenges into account. uggested topics of interest are the economy of the Limes, urbanisation and settlement dynamics, demography, military campaigns, and relationships between the Limes, the rest of the Roman Empire and the zones beyond the frontier. Statistical modelling, GIS, simulation (e.g., Agent-based modelling), network models and other types of formal approaches are all welcome. Comparative studies are especially welcomed.
Don’t know what to buy family and friends for Christmas? Get our board game! The perfect combo of awesome ancient history empire building and new academic perspectives. It makes you think AND happy at the same time, imagine that!
If you order now the game should arrive on time for Christmas (see unboxing video below for contents). No profits are made on the game. A note on shipping: our online shop is based in the US and international shipping is expensive. However, up to 5 games fit into a single shipping box, so we recommend you combine your orders to split the shipping costs. For international purchases we also recommend you select priority shipping, because it will allow you to track your package in the likely case customs apply in the delivery country.
This is a board game by archaeologists for everyone. It was made by Iza Romanowska, Shawn Graham and myself. We wanted to do a fun public outreach activity that highlights key aspects of our research: how can we simulate the Roman economy? We find that simulation is very much like playing a board game. The only difference being that a simulation is played by a computer hundreds or thousands of times rather than by you and your family fighting over the rules during the Christmas break. The disagreements and discussions that arise over playing a board game we actually find very similar to the process we go through when making a computer simulation. Why is this rule the way it is? Is it really the best representation of the Roman world? Why don’t we change it and see what happens? This is why we thoughts a board game is the ideal format to share this part of our research.
Mod your game and let us know what you think! Disagree with us, simulate your own Roman economy, publish your findings!
Want to get expert training on computational methods for archaeological research, by specialists, in sunny Barcelona? Come to the…
Summer school in digital archaeology
10-14 September 2018, Barcelona (immediately following EAA)
The Summer School in Digital Archaeology will provide comprehensive training in agent-based modelling, network science, semantic technology, and research software development for archaeological research. It will take place in Barcelona between 10-14 September 2018 immediately after the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA2018). Pre-register online now! A large number of bursaries to support registration costs are available.
More information and a preliminary programme can be found on our website:
All pre-registrations received before 1 April 2018 will be considered for bursaries!
Hope to see you in Barcelona!
Event sponsored by: Complex Systems Society, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Complexity Lab Barcelona, Roman EPNet, Siris Academic, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona
Submit a paper to the CAA @ EAA session, bring your data to our data clinic, or attend our computational archaeology summer school immediately after EAA!
During the conference we will be running a standard paper session: CAA@EAA: Computational Models in Archaeology (abstract below) focusing on formal, computational models in archaeology (not exclusively simulation, but we do like our ABMs ;). The abstract deadline is 15 February. You can submit your abstract via the EAA system.
On top of that throughout the conference we will offer Data Clinic – a personalised one-to-one consultation with data and modelling specialists (summary below). In order to give us a head-start with matching archaeologists to data experts we ask participants to submit a short summary outlining their data, research questions and the ideas they may already have via the standard route of the EAA system (please note, that as an alternative format it will not count towards the paper limit imposed by the EAA).
Finally, we are very excited to announce the Summer School in Digital Archaeology which will take place immediately after the EAA, between 10-14 September 2018. A week of hands-on tutorials, seminars, team challenges and intensive learning, the Summer School will provide an in depth training in formal computational models focusing on data modelling, network science, semantic web and agent-based modelling. Thanks to the generous support of the Complex Systems Society we are able to offer a number of bursaries for the participants. For more details please see the School website; we recommend to pre-register as soon as possible (pre-registration form).
Session: #672
CAA @ EAA: Computational Models in Archaeology
Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each
Models are pervasive in archaeology. In addition to the high volume of empirical archaeological research, there is a strong and constant interest among archaeologists and historians in questions regarding the nature, mechanisms and particularities of social and socio-natural processes and interactions in the past. However, for the most part these models are constructed using non-formal verbal arguments and conceptual hypothesis building, which makes it difficult to test them against available data or to understand the behaviour of more complex models of past phenomena.
The aim of this session is to discuss the role of formal computational modelling in archaeological theory-building and to showcase applications of the approach. This session will showcase the slowly changing trend in our discipline towards more common use of formal methods.
We invite contributions applying computational and quantitative methods such as GIS, data analysis and management, simulation, network science, ontologies, and others to study past phenomena concerned with societal change, human-environment interactions and various aspects of past systems such as economy, cultural evolution or migration. Methodological and theoretical papers on the benefits and challenges of quantification, the epistemology of formal methods and the use of archaeological material as a proxy for social processes are also welcome.
Main organiser:
dr Iza Romanowska (Spain), dr Luce Prignano (Spain), María Coto-Sarmiento (Spain), dr Tom Brughmans (United Kingdom), Ignacio Morer (Spain)
Session: #663
Archaeological Data Clinic. Personalised consulting to get the best of your data
Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Discussion session: Personalised consulting to get the best of archaeologial data. We will set up meetings with an expert in data analysis / network science / agent-based modelling.
In the ideal world we would all have enough time to learn statistics, data analysis, R, several foreign and ancient languages and to read the complete works by Foucault. In reality, most researchers artfully walk the thin line between knowing enough and bluffing. The aim of this workshop is to streamline the process by pairing archaeologists with data and computer science specialists.
If you have a dataset and no idea what to do with it…
if you think PCA/least cost paths / network analysis / agent-based modelling is the way forward for your project but you don’t know how to get started…
If you need a second opinion to ensure that what you’ve already done makes sense…
…then this drop-in clinic is for you.
Let us know about your case by submitting an abstract with the following information:
A few sentences project outline;
Type and amount of data;
Research question(s);
What type of analysis you’d like to perform? (if known).
We will set up a meeting with an expert in data analysis / network science / agent-based modelling. They will help you to query and wrangle your data, to analyse and visualise it and to guide you on the next steps. They may help you choose the right software or point you towards a study where similar problems have been solved. In a nutshell, they will save you a lot of time and frustration and make your research go further!
Dr Luce Prignano (Spain), Dr Iza Romanowska (Spain), Dr Sergi Lozano (Spain), Dr Francesca Fulminante (United Kingdom), Dr Rob Witcher (United Kingdom), Dr Tom Brughmans (United Kingdom)
Agent-based modelling is no longer a niche pursuit in archaeology. It’s a thriving sub-discipline with an active community engaged in developing original methods and software to tackle a varied range of archaeological research topics. This is reflected in a new bibliography project by the SimulatingComplexity team, and in particular Iza Romanowska and Lennart Linde. They compiled all published cases they could find in a structured Github archive. Everyone is invited to add missing publications to the corpus!
We welcome abstracts from those studying the human past using tools from network science, agent-based modelling and other complexity science approaches.
What? A session at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Techniques in Archaeology (CAA) conference
Agents, networks and models: formal approaches to systems, relationships and change in archaeology
Iza Romanowska Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
Tom Brughmans University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Benjamin Davies University of Auckland, New Zealand
Even if much ink has already been spilled on the need to use formal, computational methods to represent theories, compare alternative hypotheses and develop more complex narratives, the idea is still far from being firmly established in archaeology.
Complexity Science, the study of systems consisting of a collection of interconnected relationships and parts, provides a useful framework for formalising social and socio-natural models and it is often under this umbrella term that formal models are presented in archaeology. It has a particular appeal for researchers concerned with humans, as it stresses the importance of individual actions and interactions, as well as relations between individuals and wider system elements. Archaeology is a discipline that studies long-term, large-scale shifts in social change, human evolution, and relationships with the environment; how these phenomena emerge through the actions and interactions of individuals are questions that lie at the heart of our interests. Complexity Science offers an arsenal of methods that were developed specifically to tackle these kind of mulitscalar, multifaceted research questions.
This session will provide a forum for archaeological case studies developed using Complexity Science toolkits as well as for more methodological papers. We invite submissions of models at any stage of development from the first formalisation of the conceptual model to presenting final results.
Possible topics include but are not limited to applications or discussions of the following approaches:
Complexity science,
Network science,
Agent-based and equation-based modelling,
System dynamics,
Long-term change in social systems,
Social simulation in geographical space,
Complex urban systems, space syntax, gravity models.
We invite papers for a session on complexity science/advanced data analysis/formal modelling at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC, Edinburgh, 12-14 April 2018). Please find the abstract below. This is a double session, the first part ‘Exploring Complex Systems’ will focus on finding patters, defining relationships and exploring past complexity, while the second part ‘Understanding Change’ will showcase applications of formal methods to understand social and economic processes and change.
If you would like to discuss your paper before submitting, please feel free to contact us (see cc).
Tom Brughmans, John W. Hanson, Matthew J. Mandich, Iza Romanowska, Xavier Rubio-Campillo
Call for papers, session at Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Edinburgh 12-14 April 2018:
Formal Approaches to Complexity in Roman Archaeology: Exploring Complex Systems and Understanding Change
Part 1: Exploring Complex Systems
Part 2: Understanding Change
Session Organisers: Tom Brughmans (University of Oxford) – John W. Hanson (University of Colorado) – Matthew J. Mandich (University of Leicester) – Iza Romanowska (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) – Xavier Rubio-Campillo (University of Edinburgh)
In recent years archaeologists have increasingly employed innovative approaches used for the study of complex systems to better interpret and model the social, political, and economic structures and interactions of past societies. However, for the majority of Roman archaeologists these approaches remain elusive as a comprehensive review and evaluation is lacking, especially regarding their application in Roman archaeology.
In brief, a complex system is made up of many interacting parts (‘components’ or ‘agents’) which form a whole that is more than the sum of its parts – i.e. the interactions of these parts lead to emergent behaviors or outcomes that cannot be (easily) predicted by examining the parts individually. While such systems are characterized by their unpredictable, adaptive, and/or non-linear nature, they are (often) self-organising and governed by observable rules that can be analysed via various methods. For example, many past phenomena, such as urbanism or the functioning of the Roman economy, are complex systems composed of multiple interacting elements and driven by the diverse processes acting upon individuals inhabiting the ancient world. Thus, they can be explored using the approaches and methods of complexity science.
The study of complex systems has primarily been undertaken in contemporary settings, in disciplines such as physics, ecology, medicine, and economics. Yet, as the complex nature of ancient civilizations and their similarity to present-day systems is being steadily realized through ongoing analysis, survey, and excavation, archaeologists have now begun to use methods such as scaling studies (e.g. settlement scaling theory), agent-based modeling, and network analyses to approach this complexity. Since these methodologies are designed to examine the interactions and feedback between components within complex systems empirically, they can provide new ways of looking at old data and old problems to supply novel conclusions. However, such methods have only been applied sporadically in ancient settings, and even less so in a Roman context or using Roman archaeological data.
Thus, in this two part session we aim to bring these methods, and the Roman archaeologists using them, together by offering a critical review of the theoretical and empirical developments within the study of past complex systems and their interplay with existing ideas, before investigating how we might capitalize on the new opportunities afforded by them in the future. Part I of this session, ‘exploring complex systems’, is concerned with examining and unraveling the underlying structures present in the archaeological record using the formal tools provided by the complex systems framework. Part II, ‘understanding change’, will focus on applications exploring the dynamics of change that generated the patterns observed in existing evidence. In particular, we invite contributions using formal methods including computational modelling and simulation, GIS, and network analyses, as well as diverse theoretical approaches to better understand ancient complex systems.
I can recommend presenting at this event. I’ve been assured network talks are welcome!
Deadline CFP: 26 May
Where? Cancun, Mexico
We are pleased to announce a call for abstracts for our session on “Evolution of Cultural Complexity” at the annual “Conference on Complex System”. The Conference on Complex System will takes place this year in Cancun, Mexico, from the 17th to the 22nd of September. Our session will take pace on the 21st of September.
Human sociocultural evolution has been documented throughout the history of humans and earlier hominins. This evolution manifests itself through development from tools as simple as a rock used to break nuts, to something as complex as a spaceship able to land man on other planets. Equally, we have witnessed evolution of human population towards complex multilevel social organisation.
Although cases of decrease and loss of this type of complexity have been reported, in global terms it tends to increase with time. Despite its significance, the conditions and the factors driving this increase are still poorly understood and subject to debate. Different hypothesis trying to explain the rise of sociocultural complexity in human societies have been proposed (demographic factor, cognitive component, historical contingency…) but so far no consensus has been reached.
Here we raise a number of questions:
Can we better define sociocultural complexity and confirm its general tendency to increase over the course of human history?
What are the main factors enabling an increase of cultural complexity?
Are there reliable way to measure the complexity in material culture and social organisation constructs, that is?
How can we quantify and compare the impact of different factors?
What causes a loss of cultural complexity in a society? And how often these losses occurred in the past?
In this satellite meeting we want to bring together a community of researchers coming from different scientific domains and interested in different aspect of the evolution of social and cultural complexity. From archaeologists, to linguists, social scientists, historians and artificial intelligence specialists – the topic of sociocultural complexity transgresses traditional discipline boundaries. We want to establish and promote a constructive dialogue incorporating different perspectives: theoretical as well as empirical approaches, research based on historical and archaeological sources, as well as actual evidences and contemporary theories.
Submissions will be made by sending an abstract in PDF (maximum 250 words) via Easychair here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eec2017 . The deadline for abstract submission is on the 26th of May 2017. The contributions to this satellite will be evaluated by the scientific committee through a peer review process that will evaluate the scientific quality and the relevance to the goal of this session. Notification of accepted abstracts will be communicated by the 4th of June 2017.
The last CAA meeting in Siena saw the creation of a new special interest group in complex systems simulation. This new group will be of interest to network fans as well. The chairs Iza Romanowska, Florencia del Castillo and Juan Antonio Barceló have plans to organise sessions, workshops and networking events around the CAA conferences and independently. They will use the Simulatingcomplexity blog as well as their mailing list to keep you informed on their activities and to offer help to those who wish to apply complex systems simulation techniques to their work. Subscribe!
Want to know what it’s all about? A word from the chairs:
The staggering complexity of past societies is well recognised in archaeology. Human groups often built intricate social systems, which consist of numerous individual elements interacting with each other and with the environment and producing phenomena that are not easy to anticipate or understand using non-quantitative methods. The standard scientific answer to the challenges of investigating such systems is the large family of simulation techniques and the theoretical paradigm known as Complexity Science. In the last few years these approaches (agent-based and equation-based modelling, systems dynamics, cellular automata, network analysis etc.), have become increasingly popular among the practitioners of archaeological computing, suggesting that the time is right to bring this growing community together.
Therefore, the aim of the new Special Interest Group in Complex Systems Simulation is to provide a strong communication platform for present and future researchers working in the complex systems simulation domain. In particular, we will strive to:
provide continuity to the sessions and workshops concerned with computational modelling at the annual CAA conference and beyond,
organise, coordinate and inform the members of other events related to complexity science and simulation,
organise events aimed at training future complex systems modellers and the general archaeological audience,
define and promote good practices in archaeological computational modelling,
and, in the long term, we hope to bring simulation and other complexity science methods into mainstream archaeological practice.
To join the SIG simply sign up to the mailing list and join us at the sessions and workshops dedicated to simulation and complexity science at CAA 2016 in Oslo!
— posted on behalf of SIG leaders Florencia del Castillo, Iza Romanowska and Juan Antonio Barceló
Southampton has a great centre for Complexity Science, and this summer they will be hosting the ‘Student Conference on Complexity Science‘! This is the fourth edition of the conference (I think) but this is the very first time with an open call for papers and sessions! The conference is organised in turn by one of the UK Complexity Science Doctoral Training Centres, and it features an extremely eclectic mix of student papers and disciplines. Including archaeology of course. In fact, archaeologist Iza Romanowska is one of the co-ordinators of the event. The SCCS is all over the social-media channels, for more info you can check out their website, Facebook page, follow them on Twitter or Youtube channel. Keynotes include Nigel Gilbert (sociologist, editor of Journal of Social Systems Simulation) and Eörs Szathmáry (evolutionary biologist).
Dates for your calendar:
Call for Sessions: 12 p.m. (UTC) 27th Jan 2014
Call for Papers opens: 17th Feb 2014
Call for Papers: 12 p.m. (UTC) 26th May 2014
Papers announced: 16th Jun 2014
If you have created a computational model (Agent-based, mathematical, statistical, network analysis) within the broad topic of complex systems in archaeology, developed a new technique or particularly innovative solution to one of the recurrent issues in modelling, if you think you might have some new insights into the theoretical underpinnings of using simulations and complexity science in archaeology then we would like to hear more about it
We are organising a session on complex systems and computational models in archaeology: “S25. Agents, Networks, Equations and Complexity: the potential and challenges of complex systems simulation”. We hope to bring together a wide variety of researchers working on a diverse case studies using techniques from all spectrum of complexity science. The goal of this session is to showcase the best applications, discuss the potential and challenges and sketch out the long-term outlook for applications of simulation techniques in archaeology. For further information see the abstract below.
The call for papers closes on the 31st of October 2013. To submit an abstract, please, go to this website, create your user account, click on ‘submissions’ under the heading ‘My Space’ in the left hand side menu and follow the instructions on screen. Please do not forget to choose “S25. Agents, Networks, Equations and Complexity: the potential and challenges of complex systems simulation” from the dropdown menu “Topic”.
We will also be running a workshop on computational modelling in archaeology, which you are all welcome to join. More information about the workshop will follow in January when the workshop registration will open.
Hope to see you in Paris.
Best wishes,
Ben, Iza, Enrico, Tom
Ben Davies (Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland)
Iza Romanowska (Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, University of Southampton)
Enrico Crema (Institute of Archaeology, University College London)
Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton)
SESSION ABSTRACT
S25 Agents, Networks, Equations and Complexity: the potential and challenges of complex systems simulation
Chairs : Benjamin Davies 1, Iza Romanowska 2, Enrico Crema 3, Tom Brughmans 2
1 : The University of Auckland – Website
2 : University of Southampton – Website
3 : University College London – Website
Simulation is not new in archaeology. However, the last decade knew an increased focus among archaeologists in the use of simple computational models used to evaluate processes which may have operated in the past. Rather than all-encompassing reconstructions of the prehistoric world, models have been used as ‘virtual labs’ or ‘tools to think with’, permitting archaeologists to explore hypothetical processes that give rise to archaeologically attested structures. Computational modelling techniques such as equation-based, statistical, agent-based and network-based modelling are becoming popular for quickly testing conceptual models, creating new research questions and better understand the workings of complex systems. Complexity science perspectives offer archaeology a wide set of modelling and analytical approaches which recognise the actions of individual agents on different scales who collectively and continually create new cultural properties.
This session aims to bring together complex systems simulation applications in archaeology. We invite innovative and critical applications in analytical and statistical modelling, ABM, network analysis and other methods performed under the broad umbrella of complexity science. We hope this session will spark creative and insightful discussion on the potentials and limitations of complexity science, its many simulation techniques and the future of modelling in archaeology.
My favourite conference of the year, the CAA, will take place in Paris on 22-25 April 2014! The call for papers has now opened and the organisers put up an impressive list of sessions. I want to advertise three in particular: the ones I am involved in 😉
We will organise a workshop on network analysis for archaeologists, using a cool dataset on the Eurasian Silk Road. Those who missed The Connected Past network analysis workshop might be interested in joining this one in stead!
W11: Introduction to network analysis for archaeologists
Tom Brughmans, Ursula Brosseder, Bryan Miller
Secondly, we will host a cool new concept for a workshop: one hour, one model! The idea is that people get together, discuss a common generic archaeological research topic and spend an hour or so designing multiple computational models representing this topic.
W12: One hour, one model: Agent-based Modelling on-the-fly
Iza Romanowska, Benjamin Davies, Enrico Crema, Tom Brughmans
Finally, we will also host a session on agents, networks, equations and complexity. Exciting!
S25: Agents, Networks, Equations and Complexity: the potential and challenges of complex systems simulation
Benjamin Davies, Iza Romanowska, Enrico Crema, Tom Brughmans
Please find the full abstracts on the CAA2014 website. The deadline for abstract submissions is 31 October 2013. Don’t miss out on this cool event!
Dear Polish and less-Polish friends! Tomorrow a new CAA chapter will have it’s inaugural meeting: CAA Poland is born! The line-up sounds great, although a few more vowels would be welcome 🙂 Philip Verhagen will give a keynote presentation and Iza Romanowska might make a guest appearance with a recorded remote presentation. Check out the CAA Poland Facebook group for more information. Let’s go to Poland all!
Program konferencji:
9.30 – 10.00 rejestracja uczestników
10.00 – 10.10 inauguracja konferencji
10.10 – 10.30 CAA International i CAA oddział Polska – wprowadzenie
10.30 – 11.15 wykład gościnny: dr J.W.H.P. (Philip) Verhagen, Faculteit der Letteren (oudheid), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
11.15 – 11.30 przerwa kawowa
PANEL I: Panel ekspercki
11.30 – 11.50 dr A. Prinke (Muzeum Archeologiczne w Poznaniu) OD OŚMIOBITOWCA DO PROJEKTÓW EUROPEJSKICH”: Dorobek Muzeum Archeologicznego w Poznaniu na polu komputeryzacji”
11.50 – 12.10 mgr inż. P. Kaczmarek (Esri Polska /Fundacja Centrum GeoHistorii) Mój poligon doświadczeń z historią i archeologią czyli świat oczami GISowca
12.10 – 12.30 mgr J. D. Mejor (Biblioteka Narodowa) Stan digitalizacji w sektorze Bibliotek
12.30 – 12.45 dyskusja
12.45 – 13.00 przerwa
PANEL II: LiDAR
13.00 – 13.20 mgr M. Legut – Pintal, mgr Ł. Pintal (Politechnika Wrocławska) Perspektywy wykorzystania danych pozyskanych w programie ISOK w prospekcji archeologicznej. Przykład założeń
obronnych dorzecza Nysy Kłodzkiej
13.20 – 13.40 K. Hanus (Uniwersytet Jagielloński/ University of Sydney) Optymalizacja przetwarzania danych LiDAR pozyskanych w trakcie badań nad cywilizacjami lasu tropikalnego
13.40 – 14.00 M. Jakubczak (Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego) LiDAR, GIS, GPS w badaniach nad prahistorycznym górnictwem krzemienia, na przykładzie pola górniczego „Skałecznica Duża”
14.00 – 14.15 dyskusja
14.15 – 15.15 przerwa obiadowa
PANEL III: Nowoczesne metody dokumentacji (I)
15.15 – 15.35 inż. arch. Karolina Majdzik (Politechnika Wrocławska), Anna Kubicka (Politechnika Wrocławska) Cyfrowe metody dokumentacji w pracach archeologiczno – architektonicznych na podstawie badań w Deir el – Bahari i Marina el – Alamein
15.35 – 15.55 mgr P. Rajski (Politechnika Wrocławska) Doświadczenia z inwentaryzacji zamków śląskiego pogranicza. Porównanie metod inwentaryzacji w badaniach architektonicznych i konserwacji
15.55 – 16.15 mgr W. Ejsmond (Uniwersytet Warszawski), mgr J.Chyla (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) Zastosowanie mobilnego systemu GIS w badaniach na zespole stanowisk archeologicznych
w Gebelein
16.15 – 16.30 dyskusja
PANEL IV: Nowoczesne metody dokumentacji (II)
16.30 – 16.50 mgr Ł. Miszk (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) Standardy prowadzenia dokumentacji na stanowisku Nea Pafos
16.50 – 17.10 mgr M. Bryk, mgr J. Chyla (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) Weryfikacja archeologicznych badań powierzchniowych przy pomocy GIS
17.10 – 17.25 dyskusja
17.25 – 17.40 przerwa kawowa
PANEL V: Prospekcja i analiza danych
17.40 – 18.00 mgr B. Pankowski (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), mgr Andrzej Święch Użycie nowych technologii w badaniach podwodnych na Wiśle
18.00 – 18.20 A. Rokoszewski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) Gdzie wzrok sięga – wykorzystanie analizy pola widzenia (viewshed analysis) do badań archeologicznych
18.20 – 18.40 M. Gilewski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) Wykorzystanie Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) w badaniach nad rolnictwem Majów
18.40 – 19.00 dyskusja
Here is the abstract again, and you can download the programme by clicking on the image.
Dear all,
We would like to draw your attention to a workshop on agent-based modelling in archaeology as part of the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference
Ever wondered what all this complex systems talk in archaeology is about, or how to design your own sophisticated simulation model? Then this might be for you:
We will organise a workshop on complex systems and agent-based simulations models in archaeology at the CAA Conference in Perth, Australia, this March. Places are still available but Early Bird Registration to the conference ends on Thursday February 7th, so hurry up to get a discount! The workshop itself is free of charge.
The workshop will take place on Monday March 25th and will consist of a morning and an afternoon session. At the end of the day you will be able to design and program your own simulation model to help you answer your research questions in archaeology or related social sciences – guaranteed …
Registration to the workshop will be announced on the CAA website soon, but you can already reserve a seat by contacting Carolin at cv275@cam.ac.uk
For further information see the abstract below. A flyer with a detailed programme is attached.
Hope to see you there.
Best wishes,
Carolin, Iza, Tom and Eugene
Carolin Vegvari (Department of Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Iza Romanowska (Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, University of Southampton)
Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton)
Eugene Ch’ng (IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, University of Birmingham)
WORKSHOP ABSTRACT
W1: Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in Archaeology
Chairs: E. Ch’ng, C. Vegvari
Discussants: I. Romanowska, T. Brughmans
Modelling in various forms has always been an integral part of archaeology. In the broadest sense, archaeology is the study of human activities in the past, and a model is a simplified representation of reality. As a map is a useful abstract of the physical world that allows us to see aspects of the world we chose to, so a computational model distils reality into a few key features, leaving out unnecessary details so as to let us see connections. Human societies in their environmental context can be considered as complex systems. Complex systems are systems with many interacting parts, they are found in every hierarchy of the universe, from the molecular level to large planetary systems within which life and humanity with its cultural developments occur. Formal modelling can help archaeologists to identify the relationships between elements within a complex socio-environmental system in that particular hierarchy. Simulating large populations and non-linear interactions are computationally expensive. In recent years, however, the introduction of new mathematical techniques, rapid advances in computation, and modelling tools has greatly enhanced the potential of complex systems analysis in archaeology. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is one of these new methods and has become highly popular with archaeologists. In Agent-Based Modelling, human individuals in ancient societies are modelled as individual agents. The interaction of agents with each other and with their environment can give rise to emergent properties and self-organisation at the macro level – the distribution of wealth within a society, the forming of cohesive groups, population movements in climate change, the development of culture, and the evolution of landscape use are among the examples. Thus, the application of Agent-Based Models to hypothesis testing in archaeology becomes part of the question. The ability to construct various models and run hundreds of simulation in order to see the general developmental trend can provide us with new knowledge impossible in traditional approaches. Another advantage of agent-based models over other mathematical methods is that they can easily model, or capture heterogeneity within these systems, such as the different characteristics (personalities, gender, age, size, etc), preferences (coastal, in-land, food, fashion), and dynamics (microstates of position and orientation).
We would like to invite archaeologists new to complex systems and Agent-Based Modelling for an introductory workshop on Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in archaeology. The workshop introduces the concept of Complexity in archaeology, drawing relationships between Information, Computation and Complexity. The practicality of the workshop leads beginners in building simple agent- based models and provides a means to build more complex simulations after. Participants knowledgeable in Complexity wishing to gain insights on real-world applications of Complexity will benefit from this workshop. Participants will get the opportunity to experiment with simple models and draw conclusions from analysis of simulations of those models. Programming experience is not required as the workshop leads beginners from the ground up in modelling tools.
In two previous blogposts (1, 2) I introduced the amazing Connected Island project Iza and I have been working on recently. This third blogpost about the Connected Island project will introduce our method for analysing publications and their citations. We will briefly discuss how citation network analysis works and the issues surrounding its applications. Finally, we will look at the very first results of this project: an analysis of publications about the Middle and Lower Palaeolithic in Hungary. Hungarian Houses of Parliament
Citation network analysis
Recently, a wider availability of powerful computational resources, bibliometric software (e.g. HISTCITE; PAJEK; PUBLISH OR PERISH) and large bibliographic datasets in the sciences as well as the humanities resulted in significant progress in the analysis of citation networks in which vertices represent publications and a directed edge (or arc) between two vertices indicates a citation (Eom and Fortunato, 2011).
The foundations of citation network analysis were laid by Garfield et al. (1964) and the application of graph theory for citation network analysis was subsequently explored by Garner (1967). Despite this long tradition, its use in an archaeological context has not yet been thoroughly explored. In a number of studies researchers used simple counts of citations or other bibliometric data to track trends in the archaeological sciences and compare the impact and evolution of archaeological journals (e.g. Butzer, 2009; Marriner, 2009; Rehren et al., 2008; Rosenswig, 2005; Sterud, 1978), or to evaluate the impact of gender differentiation in archaeology (e.g. Beaudry and White, 1994; Hutson, 2002; 2006; Victor and Beaudry, 1992).
Citation network analyses in the Arts and Humanities are rare (Leydesdorff et al., 2011). The main reason for this is that the available citation databases for the Arts and Humanities (in particular the Institute for Scientific Information’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index) have significant limitations (Nederhof, 2006): books were until recently not indexed and publications in languages other than English are rare. However, monographs (rather than peer-reviewed journal articles) are often the dominant format of cited sources in the Humanities. Disciplines in the Arts and Humanities also show very different citation patterns and should therefore be considered separately (Knievel and Kellsey 2005). Despite these shortcomings citation analyses in the Arts and Humanities should not be discarded out of hand as it can still provide an alternative look at scientific practice through large aggregated datasets as long as the nature of the datasets and their limitations are thoroughly understood.
We came across some of these obstacles very early on during data collection for this project. Existing citation databases, like Web of Knowledge, contained only a fraction of the publications we were interested in. Those that are indexed in this resource are mostly written in English by Western European researchers (with a few exceptions) and it only rarely includes publications in Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, or Russian. Manual data collection was therefore necessary.
A first test: the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary
As a test-case we explored a small part of the project’s dataset, containing the 31 synthetic publications about the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary we found in Budapest’s libraries. This collection of publications was written by nine Hungarian archaeologists between 1945 and 1990. This case-study aims to explore the citation patterns between them. Chronological plot of citation network of Hungarian Palaeolithic researchers. Nodes are publications and directed lines are citations. Colours reflect publication language.
One would expect the older publications to be the most prominent since these had the time to accumulate the largest number of citations, and the results do show this process to some extent. Using the input domain measure (de Nooy et al., 2005: p. 193) we found that a few publications from the 50’s and early 60’s can be connected to by a larger number of nodes than any of the publications from the late 60’s and later, which indicates that these few publications influenced (directly or indirectly) the largest number of other publications. All of these publications with a high input domain were in fact written by a single author László Vértes who, although being very often cited by his colleagues, is guilty of quite a bit of self-citation as well. Although self-citation is common in academia and completely understandable (one always builds on one’s previous research), we needed to evaluate to what extent this affects the analytical techniques used. In this case the input domain seems to reflect largely the citation behaviour of one scholar who was extremely active throughout several decades. Input domain score of publications: the number of publications that can be connected to a certain publication via a sequence of citations. This reflects the potential field of influence of a publication.
Another way of evaluating the relative prominence of old and more recent publications is to look at the number of citations they received. It is interesting to note that the oldest as well as the recent publications receive a relatively small number of citations compared to a few publications from the mid- to late-60‘s. One of these is a monograph edited by Vértes on one of the most important Middle Palaeolithic sites in Hungary, Tata, which also received a high input domain score. The second highly cited publication was a book about the Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary also written by Vértes. The third most frequently cited work is a monograph about another prominent Middle Palaeolithic site, Érd, written by Veronika Gábori-Csánk.
In citation network analysis authoritative sources are often defined as publications that receive a high number of citations and particularly from so-called hubs. Hubs are defined as publications that cite a lot of other works especially authorities. Given these definitions we can identify the site monographs of Tata and Érd as well as the second highly cited book by Vértes as such authorities. The hubs in this network are three publications by the same authors: Miklos Gábori. All three of these publications are reviews of the Hungarian Palaeolithic and due to their very nature will include a lot of references, especially to key site reports.
The above measures very much over-emphasize the most cited publications and the work of the most active authors. We should note, however, that six works in this citation network are not cited or do not cite any others. These include publications from the 60’s by Vértes and Gabori, a few publications from the 50’s that seem to have been ignored by all those who followed, and the most recent publications from 1988 and 1990 that could not have been cited by others in this network.
Language of Publication
On the basis of the small sample of publications gathered in Budapest we can say that the widely held assumption that archaeological data from Central Europe was published in local languages is incorrect (Table 2). At least half, if not more, of Central European archaeology publications from this period were published in German, French or English alongside the national language. The image that all countries under the influence of the former Soviet Union published in Russian is incorrect. Hungarian researchers in the case study, number of publications per language, and publishing date of publications included in the case study.
Conclusions
We can conclude that although the effects of self-citation were definitely felt in this analysis, especially by those authors of whom we included multiple publications like Vértes or Gábori-Csánk, there are a number of publications that can be considered most pivotal in Hungarian Palaeolithic studies. These include the site reports of Tata and Érd.
Contrary to popular believe, Hungarian authors rarely published in their own language. Especially key site reports and synthetic works were written in these foreign languages, making them accessible to Western European archaeologists.
This blog post has explored the citation behaviour within a subset of the project’s dataset, and has concluded that Hungarian Palaeolithic archaeologists cited Central European and famous Western European scholars almost equally. Publications were almost always written in English, French or German, in addition to Hungarian, making most of them accessible to Western European archaeologists. But did the latter build on the work done by their Hungarian colleagues to improve their understanding of the European Lower and Middle Palaeolithic? Future work in this project will focus on the interactions between Western and Central European researchers.
Bibliography
Beaudry, M., & White, J. 1994. Cowgirls with the Blues? A Study of Women’s Publication and the Citation of Women’s Work in Historical Archaeology. In C. Claassen (ed) Women in Archaeology, 138–158. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Butzer, K.W. 2009. Evolution of an interdisciplinary enterprise: the Journal of Archaeological Science at 35years. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(9): p.1842–1846.
Eom, Y.-H., & Fortunato, S. 2011. Characterizing and Modeling Citation Dynamics M. Perc (ed). PLoS ONE 6(9): p.e24926.
Garfield, E., Irving, H.S., & Richard, J.T. 1964. The use of citation data in writing the history of science. Philadelphia: Institute for scientific information.
Garner, R. 1967. A computer-oriented graph theoretic analysis of citation index structures. In B. Flood (ed) Three drexel information science research studies, 3–46. Philadelphia: Drexel press.
Hutson, S. 2002. Gendered citation practices in American Antiquity and other archaeology journals. American antiquity 67(2): p.331–342.
Hutson, S.R. 2006. Self-Citation in Archaeology: Age, Gender, Prestige, and the Self. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13(1): p.1–18.
Knievel, J.E., & Kellsey, C. 2005. Citation analysis for collection development: a comparative study of eight humanities fields. The Library Quarterly 75(2): p.142–168.
Leydesdorff, L., Hammarfelt, B., & Salah, A. 2011. The structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A mapping on the basis of aggregated citations among 1,157 journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62(12): p.2414–2426.
Marriner, N. 2009. Currents and trends in the archaeological sciences. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(12): p.2811–2815.
Nederhof, A. 2006. Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities : a review. Scientometrics 66(1): p.81–100.
Nooy, W. de, Mrvar, A., & Batagelj, V. 2005. Exploratory social network analysis with Pajek. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rehren, T., Grattan, J., & Klein, R. 2008. Going strong, and growing. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: p.94305.
Rosenswig, R. 2005. A tale of two antiquities: Evolving editorial policies of the SAA journals. The SAA Archeological Record 5(1): p.15–21.
Sterud, E. 1978. Changing Aims of Americanist Archaeology: A Citations Analysis of American Antiquity. 1946-1975. American Antiquity 43(2): p.294–302.
Victor, K., & Beaudry, M. 1992. Women’s Participation in American Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology: A Comparative Look at the Journals American Antiquity and Historical Archaeology. In C. Claassen (ed) Exploring Gender through Archaeology, 11–22. Madison, Wisconsin: Prehistory Press.
I will be involved in an awesome workshop on agent-based modelling in Archaeology at CAA 2013 in Perth. Sound interesting? Hell yeah! Read the outline below and feel free to register you interest. Click here or on the image to the left to check out our awesome flyer (courtesy of Iza Romanowska).
Dear all,
We would like to draw your attention to a workshop on agent-based modelling in archaeology as part of the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference
Ever wondered what all this complex systems talk in archaeology is about, or how to design your own sophisticated simulation model? Then this might be for you:
We will organise a workshop on complex systems and agent-based simulations models in archaeology at the CAA Conference in Perth, Australia, this March. Places are still available but Early Bird Registration to the conference ends on Thursday February 7th, so hurry up to get a discount! The workshop itself is free of charge.
The workshop will take place on Monday March 25th and will consist of a morning and an afternoon session. At the end of the day you will be able to design and program your own simulation model to help you answer your research questions in archaeology or related social sciences – guaranteed …
Registration to the workshop will be announced on the CAA website soon, but you can already reserve a seat by contacting Carolin at cv275@cam.ac.uk
For further information see the abstract below. A flyer with a detailed programme is attached.
Hope to see you there.
Best wishes,
Carolin, Iza, Tom and Eugene
Carolin Vegvari (Department of Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Iza Romanowska (Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, University of Southampton)
Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton)
Eugene Ch’ng (IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, University of Birmingham)
WORKSHOP ABSTRACT
W1: Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in Archaeology
Chairs: E. Ch’ng, C. Vegvari
Discussants: I. Romanowska, T. Brughmans
Modelling in various forms has always been an integral part of archaeology. In the broadest sense, archaeology is the study of human activities in the past, and a model is a simplified representation of reality. As a map is a useful abstract of the physical world that allows us to see aspects of the world we chose to, so a computational model distils reality into a few key features, leaving out unnecessary details so as to let us see connections. Human societies in their environmental context can be considered as complex systems. Complex systems are systems with many interacting parts, they are found in every hierarchy of the universe, from the molecular level to large planetary systems within which life and humanity with its cultural developments occur. Formal modelling can help archaeologists to identify the relationships between elements within a complex socio-environmental system in that particular hierarchy. Simulating large populations and non-linear interactions are computationally expensive. In recent years, however, the introduction of new mathematical techniques, rapid advances in computation, and modelling tools has greatly enhanced the potential of complex systems analysis in archaeology. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is one of these new methods and has become highly popular with archaeologists. In Agent-Based Modelling, human individuals in ancient societies are modelled as individual agents. The interaction of agents with each other and with their environment can give rise to emergent properties and self-organisation at the macro level – the distribution of wealth within a society, the forming of cohesive groups, population movements in climate change, the development of culture, and the evolution of landscape use are among the examples. Thus, the application of Agent-Based Models to hypothesis testing in archaeology becomes part of the question. The ability to construct various models and run hundreds of simulation in order to see the general developmental trend can provide us with new knowledge impossible in traditional approaches. Another advantage of agent-based models over other mathematical methods is that they can easily model, or capture heterogeneity within these systems, such as the different characteristics (personalities, gender, age, size, etc), preferences (coastal, in-land, food, fashion), and dynamics (microstates of position and orientation).
We would like to invite archaeologists new to complex systems and Agent-Based Modelling for an introductory workshop on Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in archaeology. The workshop introduces the concept of Complexity in archaeology, drawing relationships between Information, Computation and Complexity. The practicality of the workshop leads beginners in building simple agent- based models and provides a means to build more complex simulations after. Participants knowledgeable in Complexity wishing to gain insights on real-world applications of Complexity will benefit from this workshop. Participants will get the opportunity to experiment with simple models and draw conclusions from analysis of simulations of those models. Programming experience is not required as the workshop leads beginners from the ground up in modelling tools.
This second blog post about the Connect Island project, funded by a sotonDH small award, discusses the relative influence of Central European Palaeolithic researchers using the H-index measure.
Figure 1: H-index scores of Central European Palaeolithic researchers (left) versus Iron Age (right) researchers.
It has been claimed that Central European archaeologists specializing in Stone Age studies are quite well-known in the West compared to their colleagues leading research in later epochs. To test this anecdotal supposition we analysed the H-index of Central European Palaeolithic researchers.
The H-index (Hirsch 2005) is a measure of an author’s academic impact that takes into account both the number of papers published by the author and the number of citations to these papers (Bornmann and Daniel 2005; 2007). Its main advantage is that it balances the effects of a small number of high hitting papers and a large number of rarely cited publications. Neither a researcher with a one-hit-wonder paper, nor one producing hundreds of mediocre publications will score high. The H-index therefore favours enduring performance both in terms of quality and quantity. We used publications and citations recorded in Google Scholar as it covers a higher number of publications than ISI Web of Knowledge, especially for the fields of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities (Kousha and Thelwall 2008). In contrast to ISI Web of Knowledge, however, Google’s bibliographic indexing is automated and not routinely manually edited by Google staff making it prone to inconsistencies and duplication. We noticed that the H-index results for archaeologists were unrealistically low when only taking publications in Web of Knowledge into account, and Google Scholar was therefore considered the lesser of two evils.
To provide a benchmark, we compared the results with a large sample of Central European Iron Age researchers. The Central European Iron Age is quite extensive, well-studied and some of its main proponents are well-known internationally. Arguably, the fact that we are using Iron Age researchers for this benchmark is irrelevant, any sub-discipline within archaeology would have done the job. In order for the anecdotal statement we are trying to test to be true, however, the H-index scores of the Palaeolithic researchers should be close to or higher than the Iron Age researchers’.
The results strongly confirm the intuitive observation (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Compared to a test sample of Iron Age specialists, Central European Palaeolithic researchers have been quoted more extensively and their papers were more influential abroad (as reflected in Google Scholar), indicating that they had a higher direct impact (as measured by the H-index) on the discipline globally.
Palaeolithic researchers
Iron Age researchers
Karel Absolon
9
Kazimierz Bielenin
4
Viola Dobosi
5
Anna Bitner-Wróblewska
2
Boleslaw Ginter
7
Éva Bónis
3
Jan Fridrich
4
Jaroslav Böhm
6
Bohuslav Klíma
10
Miloš Čižmář
3
Michal Kobusiewicz
8
Jana Čižmářová
1
Janusz Krzysztof Kozlowski
10
Sylwester Czopek
2
Stefan Kozlowski
9
Petr Drda
4
Gábori Miklós
5
Jan Filip
11
Martin Oliva
9
Kazimierz Godlowski
7
Romuald Schild
22
Eszter Istvánovits
2
Josef Skutil
5
Libuše Jansová
3
Jiří Svoboda
14
Fitz Jenő
9
Karel Valoch
14
Piotr Kaczanowski
5
László Vértes
11
Andrzej Kokowski
3
Jerzy Kmieciński
4
Valéria Kulcsár
2
Karel Ludikovský
1
Henryk Machajewski
2
Renata Madyda-Legutko
3
Magdalena Mączyńska
3
Jiří Meduna
4
Szabó Miklós
5
Karla Motyková-Šneidrová
2
Jerzy Okulicz-Kozaryn
2
Emanuel Šimek
4
Jaroslav Tejral
8
Andrea Vaday
3
Natalie Venclová
5
Jiří Waldhauser
3
Ryszard Wołągiewicz
2
Table 1: all Palaeolithic and Iron Age researchers included in the analysis with their H-index scores.
The Matthew effect?
We suspect that we are dealing here with a good example of the “Matthew effect” in science. Coined by Robert K. Merton (1968), the term refers to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” – Matthew 25:29.
In simple terms it can be referred to as the “rich get richer” effect. Applied to academia it describes the phenomenon of more established, better-known scholars receiving disproportionately more credit than their lesser-known colleagues for equal or even smaller contributions to the research. Thus, they are more likely to spread their results wider and to have a higher impact on the discipline. Lower Palaeolithic archaeology had an additional boost when it came to creating a strong Matthew effect. The few irregularly distributed Lower Palaeolithic sites could be studied and published by only a handful of specialists. As a result, only a limited number of archaeologists were drawn into Palaeolithic studies and those who did were exempt from the fierce competition that their colleagues working on later epochs faced.
This also meant that invitations to conferences, scientific collaboration and co-authoring would be shared within a smaller cluster of scholars creating a self-propelling positive feedback loop and strengthening the natural Matthew effect. Combined with the nature of Palaeolithic data which is of global relevance and the high demand for Palaeolithic researchers in the second half of the 20th century, this could have contributed to a better recognition of Central European Palaeolithic researchers in the West, giving them more opportunities to collaborate, publish and spread their results in the international research community. Such a process could account for the higher H-index compared to their colleagues specializing in later epochs.
Bibliography
Bornmann, L., H.-D. Daniel. 2005. “Does the h-index for ranking of scientists really work?” Scientometrics 65 (3): 391-392. doi:10.1007/s11192-005-0281-4.
Bornmann, L., H.-D. Daniel. 2007. “What do we know about the h-index?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (9): 1381-1385. doi:10.1002/asi.20609.
Hirsch, J. E. 2005. “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46) (November 15): 16569-16572. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102.
Kousha, K., M. Thelwall. 2007. “Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines.” Scientometrics 74 (2): 273-294. doi:10.1007/s11192-008-0217-x.
Merton, Robert K. 1968. “The Matthew Effect in Science.” Advancement of Science 159 (3810): 56-63.
Merton, Robert K. 1988. “The Matthew Effect in Science II. Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property.” Sociology. The Journal of the British Sociological Association 159: 606-623.
Happy New Year all! There are a couple of events in 2013 I am really looking forward to, including the CAA conference in Perth and the SAAs in Hawaii, more about those later. The first conference of the year for me will be CAAUK in London, on 22-23 February. The programme sounds great, with a keynote by Mark Lake discussing the special issue of World Archaeology he recently edited on Open Archaeology. Registration is now open but almost full, so hurry up if you wanna be part of it!
I will present a poster on a project Iza Romanowska and I have set up: ‘A Connected Island?: how the Iron Curtain affected archaeologists’. We are touring Central Europe’s libraries for this project, collecting publications by Central European Palaeolithic archaeologists. We hope to be able to evaluate the interactions between Western and Central European archaeologists, and we hope our methodology of citation network analysis will help us do this. More about the project in later posts! The poster will be presented by Iza at the Unravelling the Palaeolithic conference in Cambridge this weekend. Here is the abstract:
‘A Connected Island?’: How the Iron Curtain affected Palaeolithic Archaeologists in Central Europe
Iza Romanowska (Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of Southampton)
Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton)
After the Second World War the Iron Curtain sliced through the very centre of Europe. The Soviet regime introduced a new structure to the academic institutions in countries like Poland, Hungary and former Czechoslovakia, including restrictions on contacts with the Western world and ideological pressure. How did this situation affect researchers on both sides? Was Central European Academia really isolated from western influences?
It is difficult to quantitatively determine to what degree these limitations affected archaeologists. The project team argues that citation data might allow (at least in part) for such a quantitative evaluation. Citations are like handy formal proxies for tracing lines of knowledge dissemination and academic influence, obviously not fully representative for these very complex processes, but well suited to quantify the ‘awareness’ of other peoples’ research.
The project will initially focus on the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Poland, former Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Citations have been extracted from publications of a synthetic nature (i.e. not field reports) and a citation network analysis has been performed on that data. Our preliminary results indicate that a lot of common presumptions regarding the research behind the Iron Curtain, like the dominance of Russian or national languages in Academic writing, are in fact false.
Eötvös Loránd University (University of Budapest)After the Second World War the Iron Curtain sliced through the very centre of Europe forming a very real divide in both political and daily lives. In the second half of the 20th century the Soviet regime introduced a new structure to the academic institutions to countries like Poland, Hungary and former Czechoslovakia, including restrictions on contacts with the Western world and ideological pressure previously unknown in these parts of Europe. How did this situation affect researchers on both sides? Was Central European Academia really isolated from western influences? A new project funded by SotonDH aims to address this issue using Palaeolithic archaeology as a case study. In ‘A connected island? Evaluating influence and isolation of Central European Palaeolithic researchers during communism’ ACRG members Iza Romanowska and Tom Brughmans combine a traditional historiography with novel citation network analysis techniques to approach this issue from a new angle.
Isolated or not?
A heated debate has been taking place in Central European archaeology in the last two decades regarding the issue of isolation (or the lack thereof) from western influences during the second half of the 20th century. Difficulties related to obtaining the necessary passports and visas, the disparity in the values of currencies, and only limited formal international links between research institutions restricted research visits, data collection, literature review, and conference attendance. Equally hindering was the limited circulation of Western archaeological journals within the Soviet Bloc countries, and restricted accessibility to archaeological publications in general. This could have been further aggravated by language barriers and, to some extent, different disciplinary interests. All this does not necessarily mean that Central European researchers were completely unaware of what was happening in the West, as if living on an island unconnected to the rest of the world and immune to external influences.
It is difficult to quantitatively determine to what degree these limitations affected Central European researchers. The project team argues that citation data might allow (at least in part) for such a quantitative evaluation. When a researcher cites the work of another scholar they express in a very formalised way that they were influenced by this person. Citations are like handy proxies for tracing lines of knowledge dissemination and academic influence, obviously not fully representative for these very complex processes, but well suited to quantify the ‘awareness’ of other peoples research.
‘A connected island?’ will collect and explore citation data for Central European Stone Age studies, a relatively small but highly international research field that forms a well-defined case-study suitable for quantitative analysis. The project will initially focus on the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Poland, former Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The citation behaviour of scholars working in these countries will be confronted with that of Western European Palaeolithic researchers. The proposed project therefore aims to explore the degree of interaction and academic influence between Central and Western European researchers in Lower and Middle Palaeolithic archaeology during communism (1945-1989) through citation network analysis, in order to evaluate the hypothesis that Central European researchers worked in strong academic isolation.
Data collection in Hungary
Digital citation datasets are available online through services like Google Scholar or Web of Knowledge. However, neither of these is very comprehensive for books or local non-peer-reviewed journals where a lot of the Palaeolithic archaeology of Central Europe was published in. So despite of the revolution in digital data collection brought about by the World Wide Web, a critical analysis could not be performed without visiting key libraries and research institutions in Central Europe. So the ‘connected island’ team hit the road.
The first phase of data collection was conducted in May 2012. In this first round a visit was paid to the Institute of Archaeology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Thanks to a bursary from SotonDH the team could perform the second phase of data collection at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Archaeological Science at the Eötvos Loránd University, both in Budapest. The third phase will aim to collect relevant literature from the Ústav pro pravěk a ranou dobu dějinnou at Charles University in Prague.
A few preliminary results
The widely held assumption that archaeological data from Central Europe was published in local languages is false. At least half, if not more, of Central European archaeology publications from this period were published in either German, French or English alongside the national language. The image that all countries under the influence of the former Soviet Union published in Russian is incorrect.
Just like their Western European or American colleagues Central European Palaeolithic researchers worked within a very strong ‘Bordean’ framework (named after a famous French researcher: Francois Bordes and his wife Denisse de Sonneville-Bordes).
From a cursory check, one gets an impression that Palaeolithic researchers in Central Europe were well informed of the developments on the other side of the Iron Curtain and quoted western authors extensively. The same can be said in reverse for their Western European colleagues who occasionally quote one or two Central European sites but did not seem to be aware of the full scope of the research happening in the region.
A second blog post on this project will follow soon featuring the first results of the citation network analysis, aimed at exploring this notion of unbalanced citation behaviour between the Eastern and Western researchers. Watch this space.
The CAA (computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology) conference submission system has just opened and the deadline to submit papers is 10 October. Download the CFP and list of sessions here. I am involved in one session and one workshop this year, both with Iza Romanowska, Carolin Vegvari and Eugene Ch’ng. Our papers session is entitled “S9. Complex systems simulation in archaeology” and our hands-on workshop “W1. Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in Archaeology”. Feel free to submit an abstract to the session. We hope we will spark some interest in complexity and good discussion with both the session and workshop. We invite innovative and critical applications in analytical modelling, ABM, network analysis and other methods performed in a complexity science approach. So do not hesitate to submit an abstract and join discussions in Perth!
Here you can read the abstract of the paper session and of the workshop (below):
S9. Complex systems simulation in archaeology. Chairs: I. Romanowska, T. Brughmans. Discussants: E. Ch’ng, C. Vegvari Format: Paper presentation (LP)
A complex system is “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behaviour, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.” Mitchell 2009: 14. Complexity has been proclaimed as a new paradigm shift in science almost half a century ago. It developed as a response to the reductionist approach of René Descartes and the idea of a ‘clockwork universe’ that dominated past thinking for many centuries. Complexity brings a fresh alternative to this mechanistic approach. Complex Systems exist in every hierarchy of our world, from the molecular, to individual organisms, and from community to the global environment. This is why researchers in many disciplines, including archaeology, found particularly appealing the idea that global patterns can emerge in the absence of central control through interaction between local elements governed by simple rules (Kohler 2012). As a result, the unifying phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (Aristotle, Metaphysica 10f-1045a) became the common ground for scholars in many disciplines.
Due to the complex nature of interactions, the study of complex systems requires computational tools such as equation-based modelling, agent-based modelling (ABM) and complex network analysis. In recent years the number of archaeological applications of complex systems simulation has increased significantly, not in the least due to a wider availability of computing power and user-friendly software alternatives. The real strength of these tools lies in their ability to explore hypothetical processes that give rise to archaeologically attested structures. They require archaeological assumptions to be made explicit and very often force researchers to present them in quantifiable form. For example, vague concepts such as ‘social coherence’, ‘connectivity’ or even seemingly explicit ‘dispersal rates’, often have to be given numeric values if they are to be integrated into computational models. Computational tools also allow for testing alternative hypotheses by creating ‘virtual labs’ in which archaeologists can test and eliminate models which, although superficially logical, are not plausible.
The main contribution that complexity science perspectives have to offer archaeology is the wide set of modelling and analytical approaches which recognise the actions of individual agents who collectively and continually create new cultural properties. Indeed, it has been argued that a complexity science perspective incorporates the advantages of culture historical, processual and post-processual paradigms in archaeology (Bentley and Maschner 2003; Bintliff 2008). Quantifiable complex systems simulations and mathematical modelling can provide a way to bridge the gap between the reductionist approach and the constructionist study of the related whole (Bentley and Maschner 2003).
This session aims to reflect upon and build on the recent surge of complex systems simulation applications in archaeology. Innovative and critical applications in analytical modelling, ABM, network analysis and other methods performed in a complexity science approach are welcomed. We hope this session will spark creative and insightful discussion on the potential and limitations of complexity science, possible applications, tools as well as its theoretical implications.
W1. Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in Archaeology. Chairs: E. Ch’ng, C. Vegvari. Discussants: I. Romanowska, T. Brughmans
Modelling in various forms has always been an integral part of archaeology. In the broadest sense, archaeology is the study of human activities in the past, and a model is a simplified representation of reality. As a map is a useful abstract of the physical world that allows us to see aspects of the world we chose to, so a computational model distils reality into a few key features, leaving out unnecessary details so as to let us see connections. Human societies in their environmental context can be considered as complex systems. Complex systems are systems with many interacting parts, they are found in every hierarchy of the universe, from the molecular level to large planetary systems within which life and humanity with its cultural developments occur. Formal modelling can help archaeologists to identify the relationships between elements within a complex socio-environmental system in that particular hierarchy. Simulating large populations and non-linear interactions are computationally expensive. In recent years, however, the introduction of new mathematical techniques, rapid advances in computation, and modelling tools has greatly enhanced the potential of complex systems analysis in archaeology. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is one of these new methods and has become highly popular with archaeologists. In Agent-Based Modelling, human individuals in ancient societies are modelled as individual agents. The interaction of agents with each other and with their environment can give rise to emergent properties and self-organisation at the macro level – the distribution of wealth within a society, the forming of cohesive groups, population movements in climate change, the development of culture, and the evolution of landscape use are among the examples. Thus, the application of Agent-Based Models to hypothesis testing in archaeology becomes part of the question. The ability to construct various models and run hundreds of simulation in order to see the general developmental trend can provide us with new knowledge impossible in traditional approaches. Another advantage of agent-based models over other mathematical methods is that they can easily model, or capture heterogeneity within these systems, such as the different characteristics (personalities, gender, age, size, etc), preferences (coastal, in-land, food, fashion), and dynamics (microstates of position and orientation).
We would like to invite archaeologists new to complex systems and Agent-Based Modelling for an introductory workshop on Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling in archaeology. The workshop introduces the concept of Complexity in archaeology, drawing relationships between Information, Computation and Complexity. The practicality of the workshop leads beginners in building simple agent- based models and provides a means to build more complex simulations after. Participants knowledgeable in Complexity wishing to gain insights on real-world applications of Complexity will benefit from this workshop. Participants will get the opportunity to experiment with simple models and draw conclusions from analysis of simulations of those models. Programming experience is not required as the workshop leads beginners from the ground up in modelling tools.
If you order now the game should arrive on time for Christmas (see unboxing video below for contents). No profits are made on the game. A note on shipping: our online shop is based in the US and international shipping is expensive. However, up to 5 games fit into a single shipping box, so we recommend you combine your orders to split the shipping costs. For international purchases we also recommend you select priority shipping, because it will allow you to track your package in the likely case customs apply in the delivery country.
This is a board game by archaeologists for everyone. It was made by Iza Romanowska, Shawn Graham and myself. We wanted to do a fun public outreach activity that highlights key aspects of our research: how can we simulate the Roman economy? We find that simulation is very much like playing a board game. The only difference being that a simulation is played by a computer hundreds or thousands of times rather than by you and your family fighting over the rules during the Christmas break. The disagreements and discussions that arise over playing a board game we actually find very similar to the process we go through when making a computer simulation. Why is this rule the way it is? Is it really the best representation of the Roman world? Why don’t we change it and see what happens? This is why we thoughts a board game is the ideal format to share this part of our research.
We invite papers for a session on complexity science/advanced data analysis/formal modelling at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC, Edinburgh, 12-14 April 2018). Please find the abstract below. This is a double session, the first part ‘Exploring Complex Systems’ will focus on finding patters, defining relationships and exploring past complexity, while the second part ‘Understanding Change’ will showcase applications of formal methods to understand social and economic processes and change.
Archaeological Networks 