Spreading of copper technology in ancient times

Invention of copper smelting technology had a great influence on the socio-technological development of past societies. However, dynamical mechanisms that governed the spreading of this process are until now not well understood. The goal of this project is to model and describe the process of spreading and evolution of the copper production technology in ancient Europe between different socio-cultural groups and across multiple spatio-temporal scales.

Within this project, we are studying models on different scales, e.g. stochastic agent-based models on a micro-scale, metapopulation models on a mesoscale and network-based models on a macroscale. The problem of choosing the optimal model is always connected to balancing between the descriptive power of the model and its computational cost. We are working on derivation of mathematical relations between these models e.g. by using model reduction techniques, which could help in estimating an approximation error made by the choice of the model.

This is an interdisciplinary project with our colleagues from the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology at Free University Berlin.