scholarly journals Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age*

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (3) ◽  
pp. 1455-1503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gojko Barjamovic ◽  
Thomas Chaney ◽  
Kerem Coşar ◽  
Ali Hortaçsu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Gravity Model ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Trade Data ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
The Bronze Age

AbstractWe analyze a large data set of commercial records produced by Assyrian merchants in the nineteenth century BCE. Using the information from these records, we estimate a structural gravity model of long-distance trade in the Bronze Age. We use our structural gravity model to locate lost ancient cities. In many cases, our estimates confirm the conjectures of historians who follow different methodologies. In some instances, our estimates confirm one conjecture against others. We also structurally estimate ancient city sizes and offer evidence in support of the hypothesis that large cities tend to emerge at the intersections of natural transport routes, as dictated by topography. Finally, we document persistent patterns in the distribution of city sizes across four millennia, find a distance elasticity of trade in the Bronze Age close to modern estimates, and show suggestive evidence that the distribution of ancient city sizes, inferred from trade data, is well approximated by Zipf’s law.

Surface surveys in the northern Troad and the identification of Çiğlitepe as ancient Arisbe

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurettin Arslan
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Western Anatolia ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Sea Of Marmara ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Ancient City

AbstractThe region known as the Troad in western Anatolia is famed not only as the setting of Homer's Iliad but also for the Hellespont strait (modern Çanakkale Boğazı) linking the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean. In addition to large cities such as Sigeum, Abydus and Lampsacus, ancient writers also mention smaller cities located on the Hellespont. In this article, the location of the ancient city of Arisbe, presumed to have existed between Abydus and Lampsacus, is examined in the light of new archaeological data. Between 2002 and 2010, the author conducted surveys in the northern Troad. These surveys revealed an ancient settlement with archaeological material belonging to the Late Bronze Age, late Geometric, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods. The location of this settlement, the archaeological data and information from ancient literary sources all indicate that this site should be identified as Arisbe.

North European Rock Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joakim Goldhahn
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Migration Period ◽  
Farming Communities ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Bronze Age

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on rock art in northern Europe. It first provides an overview of research on the rock art traditions of northern Europe before discussing the societies and cultures that created such traditions. It then considers examples of rock art made by hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, focusing on the first rock art boom related to Neolithization. It also examines the second rock art boom, which was associated with social and religious changes within farming communities that took place around 1600–1400 bc. The chapter concludes by analysing the breakdown of long-distance networks in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age and its consequences for the making of rock art within the southern traditions, as well as the use of rock art sites during the Pre-Roman Iron Age, Roman Iron Age, and Migration Period.

scholarly journals Mining Local Specialties for Travelers by Leveraging Structured and Unstructured Data

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Jiang ◽  
Like Liu ◽  
Rong Xiao ◽  
Nenghai Yu
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Structured Data ◽  
Unstructured Data ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Mining Algorithm ◽  
Large Data Set ◽  
Ranking Score

Recently, many local review websites such as Yelp are emerging, which have greatly facilitated people's daily life such as cuisine hunting. However they failed to meet travelers' demands because travelers are more concerned about a city's local specialties instead of the city's high ranked restaurants. To solve this problem, this paper presents a local specialty mining algorithm, which utilizes both the structured data from local review websites and the unstructured user-generated content (UGC) from community Q&A websites, and travelogues. The proposed algorithm extracts dish names from local review data to build a document for each city, and appliestfidfweighting algorithm on these documents to rank dishes. Dish-city correlations are calculated from unstructured UGC, and combined with thetfidfranking score to discover local specialties. Finally, duplicates in the local specialty mining results are merged. A recommendation service is built to present local specialties to travelers, along with specialties' associated restaurants, Q&A threads, and travelogues. Experiments on a large data set show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a good performance, and compared to using local review data alone, leveraging unstructured UGC can boost the mining performance a lot, especially in large cities.

Personifying Prehistory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.

Moving across the North Sea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Van de Noort
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Prestige Goods ◽  
The North ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
The Social ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
The Bronze Age

Movements between different lands around the North Sea have always been taking place. While the North Sea was evolving gradually, over the millennia, following the melting of the Devensian ice sheet, close contacts across what remained of the North Sea Plain never ceased, as evidenced by near-parallel developments of the Maglemosian-type tools in southern Scandinavia and Britain (Clark 1936), and by particular practices such as the deliberate deposition of barbed points (see chapter 3). Connections across the North Sea throughout the Mesolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic would have been made easier because of the number of islands surviving within the rising sea. The polished axes from Dogger Bank and Brown Bank either represent human presence on these islands in the early Neolithic or else indicate that the existence of these islands sometime in the pre-Neolithic past was embedded in the social memory of later periods. Both possibilities emphasize the fact that the North Sea was a knowable and visited place. Movements across the North Sea took various forms: as exchange between elites from different regions of exotic or ‘prestige’ goods, and possibly of marriage partners; as trade in both luxury and bulk commodities; and in the transfer of people, in some cases as individuals such as pilgrims and missionaries, and in other cases as groups of pirates or as part of larger-scale migrations. Over time, connectedness across the North Sea changed both in nature and in intensity; this was due in no small part to changes in the nature of the craft available. An outline of the movement of goods from the Neolithic through to the end of the Middle Ages illustrates this. Contacts across the North Sea for the Neolithic and the Bronze Age are demonstrated in the long-distance exchange of exotic objects and artefacts, including Beaker pottery, jewellery, or other adornments of gold, amber, faience, jet, and tin; also copper and bronze weapons and tools, and flint daggers, arrowheads, and wrist guards (e.g. Butler, 1963; O’Connor, 1980; Bradley 1984; Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985).

Urban Swine and Ritual Pigs in the Bronze Age

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-91
Author(s):  
Max D. Price
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Secondary Products ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Secondary Products Revolution ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Pig Husbandry ◽  
The Bronze Age

The elite-run institutions (temples and palaces) of Bronze Age societies sought to maximize the production of storable, taxable, and tradable agricultural commodities—especially grain and wool. This brought the secondary products revolution to full fruition and solidified the transformation of cattle, sheep, and goats into animals that embodied wealth. Later this privilege extended to equids for their role in warfare. While institutional forms of wealth excluded pigs, urbanism offered a new and ideal ecological niche for pig husbandry. Pigs became especially important among the urban lower classes, perhaps as a type of “informal economy.” Yet in regions without large cities or extant traditions of eating pork, pig husbandry failed to thrive. The Levant, in particular, saw the gradual erosion of pig husbandry in favor of wealth-bearing livestock husbandry. At the same time, pigs’ ritual roles began to shift. Whereas once the sacrifice of swine was thought to ensure fertility, communication with the dead, and the absolution of sin, by the Late Bronze Age pigs connoted impurity.

scholarly journals Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Scotland: ScARF Panel Report

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Environmental Science ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Panel Report ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Stage Of Development

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings:  Building the Scottish Bronze Age: Narratives should be developed to account for the regional and chronological trends and diversity within Scotland at this time. A chronology Bronze Age Scotland: ScARF Panel Report iv based upon Scottish as well as external evidence, combining absolute dating (and the statistical modelling thereof) with re-examined typologies based on a variety of sources – material cultural, funerary, settlement, and environmental evidence – is required to construct a robust and up to date framework for advancing research.  Bronze Age people: How society was structured and demographic questions need to be imaginatively addressed including the degree of mobility (both short and long-distance communication), hierarchy, and the nature of the ‘family’ and the ‘individual’. A range of data and methodologies need to be employed in answering these questions, including harnessing experimental archaeology systematically to inform archaeologists of the practicalities of daily life, work and craft practices.  Environmental evidence and climate impact: The opportunity to study the effects of climatic and environmental change on past society is an important feature of this period, as both palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data can be of suitable chronological and spatial resolution to be compared. Palaeoenvironmental work should be more effectively integrated within Bronze Age research, and inter-disciplinary approaches promoted at all stages of research and project design. This should be a two-way process, with environmental science contributing to interpretation of prehistoric societies, and in turn, the value of archaeological data to broader palaeoenvironmental debates emphasised. Through effective collaboration questions such as the nature of settlement and land-use and how people coped with environmental and climate change can be addressed.  Artefacts in Context: The Scottish Chalcolithic and Bronze Age provide good evidence for resource exploitation and the use, manufacture and development of technology, with particularly rich evidence for manufacture. Research into these topics requires the application of innovative approaches in combination. This could include biographical approaches to artefacts or places, ethnographic perspectives, and scientific analysis of artefact composition. In order to achieve this there is a need for data collation, robust and sustainable databases and a review of the categories of data.  Wider Worlds: Research into the Scottish Bronze Age has a considerable amount to offer other European pasts, with a rich archaeological data set that includes intact settlement deposits, burials and metalwork of every stage of development that has been the subject of a long history of study. Research should operate over different scales of analysis, tracing connections and developments from the local and regional, to the international context. In this way, Scottish Bronze Age studies can contribute to broader questions relating both to the Bronze Age and to human society in general.

scholarly journals Ordinary or Extraordinary? Redressing the Problem of the Bronze Age Corded Skirt

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Sophie Bergerbrant
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Entire Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Bronze Age

This article uses previously overlooked evidence to discuss the social role of the Bronze Age corded skirt found in Scandinavia. This skirt type has been interpreted in many different ways through the years, from a summer dress to the attire of un­ married women, and more recently the popular la­ bel “ritual dress” has been applied. The aim of this article is to critically review the various interpreta­ tions of the use and social role of the corded skirt, drawing on the entire data set available for study rather than just a small sample of the known traces of corded skirts. Here it is shown that there is evi­ dence indicating that the corded skirt was used at more times, and by more people and age groups, than previously thought, suggesting that it might have been an ordinary, everyday garment rather than something extraordinary.

Price Behavior in Hellenistic Babylon

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Large Data ◽  
Price Behavior ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Price Data ◽  
Large Data Set ◽  
Ancient City

This chapter talks about Hellenistic prices in Babylon, with which a large data set has survived. The price data come from a vast archive of astronomical cuneiform tablets from the ancient city of Babylon. These tablets are unique among documents pertinent to the study of ancient history. Because of the astronomical content, any evidence extracted from these texts can be dated with certainty. Furthermore, the market quotations always were expressed in the same terms: quantities that can be purchased for one shekel (a weight measure, not a coin) of silver. In addition, values of the same six commodities were listed in a set order: barley, dates, cuscuta (mustard), cardamom (cress), sesame, and wool.

scholarly journals Effects of Bilateralism and the MFN Clause on International Trade: Evidence for the Cobden-Chevalier Network, 1860-1875

2009 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1012-1040 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Lampe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Trade ◽  
Gravity Model ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Disaggregated Data ◽  
Manufactured Goods ◽  
Bilateral Treaties

This study contributes to a revised picture of nineteenth-century bilateralism. Employing a new disaggregated data set, it argues that bilateral treaties did not implement general free trade, but instead reduced tariffs unevenly through commodity-specific preferences, especially favoring manufactured goods. Gravity model estimates show that specific liberalizations increased exports of corresponding items, but not overall trade. Exporters from countries whose governments used bilateralism strategically to bring down partner tariffs benefitted most. Hence, the network in form and outcome is more properly identified with reciprocal liberalization practiced by the French than with British free-trade ideology.

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