SIMREC (Simulating Roman Economies) explores the most hotly debated questions about the Roman economy: was the Roman Imperial trade market equally integrated as nowadays? Did Roman traders in all parts of the Empire have access to reliable commercial information from distant parts of the empire, such as the price of grain in Egypt or of oil in southern Spain? How important were social networks for structuring the flow of this information?
Answering such questions will allow us to better understand how massive integrated economies functioned over huge timescales. In fact, the Roman Empire offers one of the few historical cases where information about the functioning and performance of the economy can be traced for centuries. This is thanks to well-studied material artefacts archaeologists have uncovered in their millions around the Mediterranean, most notably Roman ceramics but also stone, shipwrecks, glass, metals and much more. In combination with texts written by ancient authors and ancient inscriptions, these artefacts allow us to explore big trends in the Roman economy. Identifying such centuries-long trends is something we simply cannot do for present-day huge integrated economies such as the EU or the US, for the simple reason that they have not existed for long enough in their strongly integrated form. The study of the Roman economy therefore offers us some unique glimpses of how large integrated market economies might work over centuries-long timescales.
But archaeologists and historians struggle to obtain such insights due to a number of methodological issues. The overall objective of project SIMREC is to help overcome two of these issues: the limited use of archaeological big data in Roman economy studies and the lack of quantitative comparisons of complex hypotheses. In doing so, SIMREC will significantly add to the accumulated knowledge on the Roman economy and will enable for the first time essential quantitative comparisons between the centuries-long Roman record and modern-day economies.
