Roman bazaar or market economy? Explaining tableware distributions through computational modelling

Authored by Tom Brughmans, Jeroen Poblome

Date Published: 2016

Sponsors: Flanders Research Foundation Belgian Programme on Interuniversity Poles of Attraction

Platforms: NetLogo

Model Documentation: ODD

Model Code URLs: https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/

Abstract

How closely integrated were the commercial centres of the Roman world? Were traders aware of supply and demand for goods in other cities, or were communities of traders in cities protectionist and working opportunistically? Widely traded commodities such as terra sigillata tablewares in the Eastern Mediterranean provide an ideal opportunity to explore the economic processes that underlie the archaeological evidence. Agent-based computational modelling allows various such processes to be explored, and also identifies areas for further investigation.

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