Tableware trade in the Roman East: Exploring cultural and economic transmission with agent-based modelling and approximate Bayesian computation
Fig 1
Data patterns derived from 8730 datable entries of 178 eastern Mediterranean sites from the ICRATES database. Left: percentage of sites with each pottery ware; note the disproportionate dominance of the earliest ware (ESA—teal), and its decrease with the introduction of the western-produced ITS (light green). We will later refer to this metric as Pattern A. Right: percentage of sites with a certain number of different wares. Note the dominance of sites with no or only one ware. We will refer to this metric as Pattern B. The two patterns capture two different aspects of the changes we are studying. Pattern A shows how each different tableware spreads to settlements throughout the time period under study, whilst pattern B shows how the diversity of tablewares changed from one settlement to another and over time. To ensure that the models of social learning we explore capture both aspects of these changes we test their ability to reproduce both patterns A and B at the same time.