PhD Opportunity in Archaeological Network Analysis, University of Melbourne
Michael Falk
PhD Scholarship opportunity, University of Melbourne, Australia
Analysis of settlement functionality in the Ancient Mediterranean through archaeological network analysis and geographical modelling
The project aims at formulating methodological solutions for the problem of site functionality in Archaeology, specifically from a geographical perspective. Field surveys often register a range of different sites whose functionality is determined through a few diagnostic pottery sherds recovered on site, next, giving the sites very generic labels like farmstead, hamlet etc. Little attention is paid to functionality from the perspective of settlement patterns as a network, or based on specific local geography, which can be expected to have exercised significant influence. On a smaller scale, some studies have looked at the organisation of resource exploitation (e.g. Verhagen, P.; Joyce, J.; Groenhuijzen, M. (eds.) 2019. Finding the limits of the limes. Modelling demography, economy and transport on the edge of the Roman Empire. Springer), using ABM (Agent Based Modelling), and landscape simulations. Other studies (Ortman, S. et al., 2015. Settlement scaling and increasing returns in an ancient society, Science Advances, 1.1, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400066) consider scaling as a function of population density, affecting labour specialisation, transport infrastructure and regional resource exploitation, and Brughmans and Brandes (2017. Visibility Network Patterns and Methods for Studying Visual Relational Phenomena in Archaeology. Front. Digit. Humanit. 4:17, DOI: 10.3389/fdig h.2017.00017) deploy visibility as criterion to measure relative prominence in settlement systems. The proposed study will evaluate available methods, and formulate a broader and more holistic approach to site functionality in Archaeology, and test them against the four case studies made available for this project.
The potential applicant needn’t necessarily be an archaeologist, so long as they have some interest and experience in spatial methods.
For information about the scholarship, please contact lieve.d...@unimelb.edu.au