Exploring territories: Bubble Model and Minimum number of contemporary settlements. A case study from Etruria and Latium Vetus from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age

Description

This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce to a wider audience the recently proposed Bubble Model: a new method to reconstruct ancient settlement territories. After a preliminary discussion of similar methods that have been used in archaeology, such as Voronoi diagrams (Thiessen polygons), Multiplicatively Weighted Voronoi diagrams and XTENT, the Bubble Model is defined and its characteristics are compared. Strengths and weaknesses are identified and discussed. The main advantages of the new model are: a diachronic approach (the reconstructions of the territories depend on the order of appearance of the settlements); the possibility to detect federative polities. The second aim is to discuss the problem of contemporaneity between settlements. It is quite common to observe, in detailed regional studies, simple maps showing the increasing or decreasing number of settlements for each chronological phase. However, since we cannot be certain of the contemporaneity of all...

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