Our goals:

This project aims to aggregate, parametrise, and synthesise primary datasets that inform the evolution of societies in the Ancient Mediterranean (ie. examine the links between social connectivity and complexity manifest in material and textual evidence). In the process, the team will develop a suite of digital approaches and tools, inspired by large-scale ecological projects like Ocean Health Index (Lowndes et al. 2017). The two mains outputs of this project will be

  • a comparative study of proxies for evolution of social complexity in the Ancient Mediterranean
  • digital tools, workflows and processes that scale and that historians and archaeologists can use in their own research.

In its digital aim, this project will deliver the next component of a digital ecosystem for ‘small-data’ domains like the humanities, namely research infrastructure for combining 'messy' and heterogeneous legacy data with 'clean' digitally born data, allowing for their streamlining and analysis in a collaborative environment.

In its empirical mission, this project will evaluate existing hypotheses of Ancient Mediterranean dynamics by aggregating and synthesising available digital datasets.

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The Social Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean (SDAM) research group is supported by the the Aarhus University Research Foundation in 2019-2022.

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