Modelling (and simulating) ancient landscapes. RELOAD, a new project for Liminal areas in Northern Tuscany

Limina, Valentina [UCL]

The paper aims to present my post-doctoral project, RELOAD (REthinking Liminality Open Access Data), funded by F.R.S.-FNRS at UCLouvain (BE). It undertakes for the first time a comparative analysis of liminal areas in the territory of Volterra between the centuries 3rd BC-5th AD. Liminal areas need specific strategies to be controlled/inhabited because of their ‘marginality’ and their peculiar environmental features (springs, marshlands, mountains, etc.). Thus, they are crucial to detecting social interactions and understanding space organization strategies, perception, and identity formation. Among its goals, RELOAD intends to prompt a flexible approach to landscape complexity, overcome ‘barriers’ between the so-called ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences, promote standardization of practices and reproducibility of results, and increase knowledge and data sharing. The main research question is: Could Northern Tuscany be considered a ‘Resilience’ or ‘Anti-fragility’ model? Together with the ‘traditional’ sources (literary texts, pottery, epigraphs), the project considers legacy data and integrates the open-access databases by Regione Toscana for historical cartography and toponymy. New data will be acquired and managed through GIS through systematic field survey campaigns. Applying Resilience and Anti-fragility concepts through Agent-Based Models is part of the broader debate about the benefits of integrating methods and theories from the socioeconomic/mathematical fields in archaeology. Simulation in NetLogo and an open-access WebGIS promote standardization of practices and reproducibility of results, emphasizing the crucial role of legacy data and the concept of ‘simplification’ in modelling: all this leads to reflecting on the methodological choices and their impact on ancient landscapes reconstruction