TY - JOUR A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa A1 - Chemnitz, Robin A1 - Kostre, Margarita A1 - Schweigart, Fleur A1 - Fless, Friederike A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Ducke, Benjamin T1 - A Mathematical perspective on Romanisation: Modelling the Roman road activation process in ancient Tunisia JF - PLoS ONE N2 - Romanisation is a multi-faceted historical phenomenon with profound and lasting cultural impact on the ancient world. In the modern-day territory of Tunisia, this is particularly manifest during the first four centuries AD, under the reign of the Roman Empire. We derive a reduced, operational concept of Romanisation as a cultural diffusion process that is observable in the archaeological remains of the Roman era settlement system. We then introduce a novel mathematical model that computes spatio-temporal approximations for the Romanisation of the settlement system. The model is based on the concept of temporal road activation and makes minimal assumptions regarding input data quality. The results of our study contribute to the understanding of the time dynamics of the region’s road network, under the influence of Romanisation. Our model can be applied in similar archaeological research scenarios, to generate spatio-temporal backbones for the analysis of otherwise intractably complex social processes. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309752 VL - 19 IS - 9 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kostre, Margarita A1 - Sunkara, Vikram A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa T1 - Inference of historical influence networks T2 - International Conference on Complex Networks & Their Applications Proceedings N2 - We study the romanization process of northern Africa from 50 BC till 300 AD. Our goal is to infer the communication strength between different subregions, based on the evolution of the status of cities. Herefore, we use the general inverse infection model, that infers the weights of a known underlying network, given observations of the spreading on this network. As infection process we choose the SI metapopulation model, where I stands for a city with a Roman status. To solve the minimization problem we use the particle swarm optimization algorithm with a specific choice of parameters. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.12752/8558 SP - 110 EP - 113 ET - International Conference on Complex Networks & Their Applications ER -