Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 89.
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        Date: 2025-07-21 04:27:33+00:00
        From: Michael Falk <michaelgfalk@gmail.com>
        Subject: PhD Opportunity in Archaeological Network Analysis, University of Melbourne

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.donnellan@unimelb.edu.au


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