Project description

In these times of fragile and moving borders, social and political shifts, and rapid climate change, looking into the past can bring much-needed insights into large-scale, long-term trends in social systems. The Roman Empire is a case in point as its centuries-long history enables us to track the evolution of large complex political-economic-administrative structures in the face of social and environmental transformations.

In this project, I will leverage the increasingly available large digitised archaeological datasets and apply cutting-edge computational techniques, to enhance our understanding of ancient demographics, thus tracking the ups and downs of border communities across centuries. By combining data science, spatial modelling of rural and urban settings as well as High-Performance Computing enabled agent-based simulation I  will be able to develop an evidence-based narrative for the population dynamics of two important border regions of the Roman Empire on the basis of archaeological data and gain insight into the sources of resilience and failure of human groups in the past and now.  

Short bio

I am a complexity scientist working on the interface between social sciences and computer science having originally trained and worked as a prehistoric archaeologist before switching to computer-based research. I specialise in agent-based modelling - a simulation technique I use for various research questions, from mobility in prehistoric cities, the first Out-of-Africa human dispersal, to large-scale economic interactions across the Roman Meditteranean and real-time pedestrian flows in modern sports venues.