A mathematical perspective on Romanisation: Modelling the Roman road activation process in ancient Tunisia.

Romanisation is a multi-faceted historical phenomenon with profound and lasting cultural impact on the ancient world. In the modern-day territory of Tunisia, this is particularly manifest during the first four centuries AD, under the reign of the Roman Empire. We derive a reduced, operational concept of Romanisation as a cultural diffusion process that is observable in the archaeological remains of the Roman era settlement system. We then introduce a novel mathematical model that computes spatio-temporal approximations for the Romanisation of the settlement system. The model is based on the concept of temporal road activation and makes minimal assumptions regarding input data quality. The results of our study contribute to the understanding of the time dynamics of the region's road network, under the influence of Romanisation. Our model can be applied in similar archaeological research scenarios, to generate spatio-temporal backbones for the analysis of otherwise intractably complex social processes.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Conrad et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)