Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological
revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through
an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural- functional models failed
to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal…[Read more]

The growth of the city of Rome was dependent on its ability to exploit successfully the human and natural resources of its hinterland. Although this hinterland eventually extended to incorporate the entire Mediterranean seaboard, the resources of the Tiber valley originally nourished the city and continued to do so despite the growth in imports…[Read more]

An appendix to my MA thesis, ‘Satisfied with a Knowledge of the Totals: Labouring to Build the Claudian Aqueducts’, Reading, 1998. In this appendix, I tried to match Ashby’s descriptions of the remains of the aqueducts with Van Deman’s descriptions. From these descriptions, I crafted a volumetric model of the quantities of materials used in the…[Read more]

Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The…[Read more]

For historians, agent-based modeling (ABM) methodologies allow us to formalise our thinking about how the past worked and explore those assumptions in a way previously limited to thought-experiments. In ABM, numerous autonomous, heterogeneous agents are allowed to interact in a digital environment according to rules of behaviour directly drawn…[Read more]