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Reconstructing a Maritime Past: Interview with Matthew Harpster - ArchaeoTech 214
456 Plays5 months ago
This week we interview Dr. Matthew Harpster about his research using polygons to measure the density of maritime activity in the ancient Mediterranean Sea. He was a guest on the show back in 2020, and 4 years later he returns to discuss his new book that reveals patterns in ancient maritime activity and creates a narrative for this activity based on archaeological data from the sea floor.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/214
Links
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Discussion
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 214. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Dr. Matthew Harpster about his new book, Reconstructing a Maritime Past. Let's get to it.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how are you doing? I'm doing all right. It's been pretty quiet around here, but yesterday I was down in the city. I'm sure you know I've told you. My wife is a curator at the Department of Ancient University and Art in the Bent Museum, and they had an event for Yemeni community. It included the Yemeni ambassador to the US, the US special envoy to Yemen,
00:00:45
Speaker
some other scholars, members of the community, dancers, coffee, all sorts of stuff about the repatriation of a couple artifacts that were in the collection that were found to have been brought out of Yemen some time ago under
00:01:00
Speaker
questionable circumstances. So those are being repatriated and there was a celebration around that. And this is one event that hopefully precedes many similar ones where, well, not necessarily with repatriation, but definitely with the involvement of the local, in this case, Yemeni diaspora community in New York.
00:01:16
Speaker
Cool. Well, that sounds like a good time. Sounds like an interesting event. Yeah. Yeah. It was really, it was a lot of fun and it was great to see all these different sort of pan-Yemeny things because I've lived in different parts of Yemen and worked in different parts and it's very culturally distinct depending where you go. But there is also this overarching sense of Yemen-y-ness, whether you're from the highlands or from Hadhramaut or the Diyama or anywhere, and that was celebrated.
00:01:40
Speaker
Nice. You know, we're planning on spending the summer in New England and I'm really hoping to get, I don't want to say to New York City because, you know, I don't want to spend too much time there because, you know, it's New York City and I have an RV, but it would be nice to visit again because man, every time you go, like we went to the Met the last time we were there and every time you go, I'm sure there's just something new to see. Right. And it would be really cool to visit there again. So. All
Modeling Ancient Maritime Activity
00:02:07
Speaker
right. Well,
00:02:08
Speaker
Speaking of revisiting things, we have a person on the show today who we talked to originally in April of 2020. So straight up COVID times. And again, we're recording this in April of 2024. So four years ago, and his name is Dr. Matthew Harpster. And he talked to us about a technique that was being developed
00:02:28
Speaker
that he's going to talk about here in the first segment. And then he's recently written a book using this technique and discussing basically how it was applied and what's going on there. So we're going to talk about that. Matthew Harpster received his PhD at Texas A&M University in 2006 and has since held research and teaching posts at MIT, Eastern Mediterranean University, the University of Birmingham. And I'll get this wrong, Koch University. It's KOC. And C's got that little thing that they put over in Turkey underneath the C.
00:02:58
Speaker
Anyway, the university in Istanbul, Turkey, which is where he's calling in from today. He has been the director of Kudar, which is the, again, I don't know how to pronounce this word, Koch or Koch University's Maritime Archaeology Research Center since 2017. So Matthew, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, no worries. So, you know, just in case our listeners are new to the show and don't exactly remember everything you discussed four years ago.
00:03:24
Speaker
Cause that was a lot of episodes ago, almost a hundred episodes ago for us, which is kind of cool and frightening in its own right. So why don't you tell us just a little bit about this model that you developed for this maritime activity thing in the Mediterranean sea. Just tell us a little bit about that as a framework for the rest of the discussion.
00:03:41
Speaker
Well, I suppose the model that I created, and this was done with Henry Chapman, who was a professor of archaeology at the University of Birmingham, we worked on this model in which we wanted to find a way in which we could illustrate the activity of ancient maritime activity that was rather different than the way we commonly saw it in a lot of scholarship, as I think the two of you have often seen.
00:04:06
Speaker
We often see bottles of maritime activity that are done with vectors or lines, and so we see a route going from point A to point B. But I feel that anyone who's been on board a ship, anyone who's tried sailing, knows that there's a whole lot of ambiguity about the route you take even before you arrive at your destination.
00:04:27
Speaker
And so what Henry and I were working on is if there's another way to visualize and illustrate that activity, and then simultaneously, if there's a way that we could really harness the potential of the maritime archaeological corpus that's present in the Mediterranean Sea.
00:04:46
Speaker
And we were interested in that as well, because from our perspective, we have, depending upon which data set you look at, we have anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 archaeological sites on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. So there must be a way to harness all that material, all that information from all these different centuries and come up with a different way of illustrating this maritime movement. And that's really where it started.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's got to be incredibly difficult too, because I would imagine, you know, most sailors, you know, and I have, you know, I've been on quite a few boats in my time and the route you choose to take is generally, you know, the shortest route between point A and point B, unless you're doing some sightseeing, which I can't imagine people doing shipping and things like that with cargo. We're doing a whole lot of sightseeing because their livelihood is based on, you know, picking up cargo and selling it somewhere else.
00:05:37
Speaker
or dropping it off and getting payment for it. But then also, the Mediterranean is also a pretty volatile place when it wants to be. I spent a whole six months there on an aircraft carrier, US aircraft carrier. And I'll tell you what, sometimes that sea really just got rocket and rolling, which is probably why there's over 1,000 shipwrecks there. And I mean, how accurate do you think you guys have gotten over the development of this model in deciding
00:06:03
Speaker
these shipping routes and where they're going and what's your confidence level in that based on the shipwrecks?
GIS Mapping and Data Visualization
00:06:10
Speaker
Well, I suppose there's a couple of things to consider. One thing to consider is that we're not necessarily, or at least with this technique we're using, we're not necessarily coming up with particular routes that you feel people were following. What we feel that we're modeling is actually areas or varying densities of hard time activity.
00:06:31
Speaker
So, for example, we might see as a result of looking at shipwreck data from the first century BC that there's a hotspot of maritime activity right off the west coast of Italy. Now, when you're asking about how we can confirm this or how we might feel that this is relatively accurate, we've got a couple of methods. One method is that we can predictably just compare this to what was happening historically.
00:06:58
Speaker
So when we look at our model and we find that in the second century BC and in the first century BC, there's this hotspot of maritime activity right off the western coast of Italy, right around the region of Latium. You know, that's the same period of time that Rome was really increasing in its power, you know, stretching its legs from a republic, slowly becoming an empire.
00:07:20
Speaker
So, you know, historically, it fits with things like that. But we also wanted to find a way in which we could more quantitatively test the accuracy of what we're doing because you guys are archaeologists, you know that the material set of information that we have can be really haphazard.
00:07:40
Speaker
it can be really broken up by all kinds of different forces, both in the past and the present. And so Henry and I were very aware of the fact that we're making models of activity from these rather haphazard sets of data. And so we wanted to find some way to more analytically determine if the models that we're making are distinctly different from haphazard random data, or if it's very similar to randomized data.
00:08:08
Speaker
And so in addition to making the models we will also sample the density of the models in certain places and then use statistical significance testing to compare the archaeological density.
00:08:22
Speaker
against the density from a model generated by randomized data. And if the P-value, that magical P-value, tells us that there's a high level of confidence in the archaeological model, then we can trust it. However, in some cases, that doesn't always work, which is a question I'm still wrestling with today, in fact.
00:08:44
Speaker
Well, can we just back up a little bit here before we go too far into the weeds? Because the interesting thing, and you gave us access to an advanced copy of your upcoming book, Reconstructing a Maritime Past, which builds off of this model and then goes way beyond it with what you can try to say about how we look at cultures and movement of people and ships and so on across the Mediterranean. But before we go down that rabbit hole,
00:09:09
Speaker
Can you just back up a little bit and briefly recap what the GIS techniques are that you're using for building these densities, these heat maps that then you're testing statistically?
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, so as I said earlier, we're not really coming up with roots as much as areas of activity. And so to come up with the hotspots of where activity may be at sea, we're simply piling up all this data from, say, all the shipwreck sites from the first century BC or the third century AD.
00:09:43
Speaker
But because we're trying to understand areas of activity as opposed to particular routes, it means that when we look at an individual site, we're also trying to come up with the area that this particular ship may have been moving around before it sank.
00:09:59
Speaker
So with the single site, we're using as much archaeological information we have within that particular assemblage. And it could be amforave coming from Campania. It could be oil lamps. It could be personal items. It could be cargo. It could be all kinds of things. But then all of those different sources of material gives us a rough estimate of where this ship may have been moving around before it sank. And predictably, there are a host of potential problems in there.
00:10:29
Speaker
People often ask, well, what about things that may not be preserved? What about items that could have been on board the ship but are no longer there? And as a result, we're only getting an incomplete record of what we see. And those are all very valid criticisms.
Textual Records vs Archaeological Models
00:10:46
Speaker
But we're in a position in which we can recognize those, but we don't really have a way of overcoming them, because it's the very same set of data that everyone else is using. And we're all stuck with these same limitations.
00:10:59
Speaker
But what we're able to do with all the magic tools in GIS is that once we have the approximate area that one ship may have been moving around, we can then simply repeat that process for all of the archaeological assemblages within our data set. And I have about 1,100 of those assemblages. So in the end, I have this map of the Mediterranean with 1,100, you could say, polygons all piled up.
00:11:28
Speaker
But once I have all those polygons, I can then use the GIS modeling and all of its fancy tools to actually measure the different densities of those polygons at different points in geo reference space. So off the coast of Italy, the example I was talking about earlier, we might find that there's a high density of those polygons off that West Coast. In other places near the Straits of Gibraltar or off the coast of Algeria, there could be a very low density of polygons.
00:11:59
Speaker
And the assumption I'm making is that if a single polygon roughly represents the area that this ship may have been operating in, then when we have all these polygons piling up, this density of them, it suggests to me that this is an area with a higher likelihood of activity, that this is an area with a higher potential of movement as opposed to other spaces at the sea.
00:12:22
Speaker
All right, I've got some questions around that, as I'm sure Paul does as well. But let's go ahead and take a break and come back and continue this discussion on the other side back in a minute. Welcome back to the Archeotech podcast, episode 214. We're talking with Matthew Harpster. Take a look at some of the links in the show notes, especially for his last episode, which is really foundational to what we're talking about here back in April of 2020, episode 126.
00:12:49
Speaker
You were talking about, at the end of the last segment, how these polygons are showing areas where there's a level of activity, basically, that ships were operating in. What is it that you're trying to, because maybe you're saying this and I'm just not getting it, but what are you trying to predict with this model? Because that's often why we have models. We say, here's what's here. We need to try to predict with this model and see if it will come up with something. So what exactly are you trying to predict with this?
00:13:17
Speaker
Well, I wouldn't quite say that I'm at a prediction stage yet, but I think in a way as a result of these models and you know, I end up with these wonderful gradient maps across the Mediterranean that look like, they look like weather maps actually predicting where there's going to be really.
00:13:35
Speaker
But as a result of those maps, it allows me to argue, as I said, that there's more activity here and less activity there. So I'm not necessarily predicting anything yet, but what I am finding is that once I've generated these maps,
00:13:51
Speaker
It allows me to do a couple of things. One is that I can compare this model of maritime activity to other sets of data. So I can compare it to terrestrial sets of archaeological data. I can compare it to textual sources that also talk about people sailing and moving around the Mediterranean.
00:14:10
Speaker
And so I think those comparisons are interesting, but I think they also reinforce in a way the second goal of these models is that they suggest that this maritime community across the Mediterranean Sea, they have a life that isn't or rather it is fairly independent that what might be happening on land.
00:14:35
Speaker
that they have a life, they have a history, they have a narrative. This is a muted and a marginalized community. And I think what these models start to do, or they suggest we can do, is that we can start to understand this muted maritime community with a bit more detail than what we might have had in the past.
00:14:57
Speaker
This didn't come to me till just as you said that right now, but it does kind of remind me of studies of nomadic cultures or semi-nomadic ones. I do most of my work in the Middle East and very famously there are nomadic cultures like the Bedouin. Is that a fair comparison? Once that aren't directly, they're not in Rome, but they certainly interact with Rome.
00:15:18
Speaker
Is that a good comparison for the maritime community that you're thinking of? I think it would be a good comparison. In fact, I'd love to talk with you afterwards to get any information you have about the material records coming out of those nomadic communities.
00:15:34
Speaker
Because, I mean, I agree a great deal. It's very similar to these nomadic groups because in the particular cases I'm looking at, rather than moving through these very arid environments, they're moving through the maritime environment. And unlike perhaps walking through the desert, you know, these individuals might have a particular route that they follow, but there could be reasons that they're not following it. There could be reasons that they're going in other directions.
00:15:59
Speaker
And so we are very much trying to model the activities of this very mobile, migratory, marginalized group of people that unfortunately don't really have a voice in the primary records that we can look at.
00:16:13
Speaker
And if I was reading your book correctly, you're looking at the material record to try to get closer to the bone, as it were, to closer to the people who are actually involved in that trade versus most of the previous studies that tend to start with a textual or a very cultural historical sense of what the ship is and who might be on it. And here you're trying to invert that, I guess, use those sources
00:16:41
Speaker
as secondary tests, I guess, against what you're finding based off of the material record and your mapping of it. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Because as we know, there's obviously an ideological, a personal, there can be all kinds of biases within these textual records. And often, these records are made by people who were literate, they're in the upper classes. These are people who are probably not sailing on these boats every day.
00:17:08
Speaker
So when we're reading these textual sources to learn more about what sailing was like in the Mediterranean, I think we're looking at it from this very particular and a very narrow perspective. And so when we can use this archaeological data, I'm not suggesting that this archaeological model and the narrative that comes out of it replaces what we have in the textual sources, but I think it creates a very nice comparison.
00:17:34
Speaker
So if the textual sources are telling us one thing and the archaeological data is telling us something else, then when we have that discrepancy, what does it mean? What is it telling us? And alternatively, when they fit together, what is that also telling us?
00:17:50
Speaker
So I have some examples in which we can look at various textual sources like Strabo, Pliny, other individuals, and they provide us with a rough cartography of the Mediterranean Sea. So they talk about the Tyrannian Sea, the Aegean, all of these different sort of places out there in the water.
00:18:11
Speaker
And so what happens when I compare my models that have these gradient heat maps against these rough cartographies of the sea? What happens? Do I find that the places that appear to have a high amount of activity, do they correlate with these cartographies known by Strabo and Pliny, for example, or do they not correlate? In some cases they do, which is an interesting question. And in other cases they don't.
00:18:45
Speaker
Are they named because there's a lot of activity there or is there a lot of activity there because they're a place that's worthy of being named? Yeah, I mean that's a great question and I think that's the sort of question we can start asking now because we have these two separate narratives about what's happening at sea.
00:19:01
Speaker
which
Historical Perspectives and Sea Level Changes
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean there's various saints when they were say taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land
00:19:04
Speaker
you think came first.
00:19:10
Speaker
But there's a particular saint who was traveling from Tunisia to the Holy Land, and he talks about all the different seas that he travels through. And what's interesting is that at the time he traveled in the fifth century A.D.,
00:19:26
Speaker
He has a whole lot of detail about the waters just offshore of where he lived. And at the same time in my models, there's a whole lot of maritime activity there. So there appears to be this very nice, how can I say, synchronicity between these two separate data sets where we have an individual with all this detailed information about what the waters were called. We also have a lot of maritime activity, but it doesn't always work that well.
00:19:54
Speaker
So listening to you talk about these patterns of maritime activity, Matthew, I was wondering, well, first off, what kind of a date range are we talking about here with the archaeological sites that are in your samples here? You said there's over 1,000 shipwrecks there. What kind of a span does this have, first off? Well, my data set runs from about the 7th century BC until the 7th century AD.
00:20:21
Speaker
Matthew, what's the reason for that particular time span, 7th century to 7th century? In a very weird way, I like the symmetry of it. Seriously. For another reason, if you look at a number of studies that plot the number of shipwreck sites or the number of archaeological sites on the seafloor,
00:20:44
Speaker
They not only roughly use that chronology, but they also demonstrate that there's a rough bell curve to the number of sites we have. And the apex of that curve is generally either right at zero or it's like the first or second century AD. So it also parallels a lot of other studies like that.
00:21:06
Speaker
Okay. Well, one thing I was wondering is sea level change, right? The Mediterranean sea, like the rest of the world has, has adjusted. I was just briefly looking this up because I knew this was true, but I was trying to find some numbers here. And there's been in some places up to several meters of sea level change since, you know, like high point of Roman times up until now. So over the seventh century BC to AD,
00:21:30
Speaker
I would imagine there was some definite variation there. Do you see changes in shipping patterns based on that? Cause I mean, just sailing around the Greek islands like we did back in October. I mean, I can get real hazardous real quick if it's a little bit lower, you know? That's a good question. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any dramatic differences. However, having said that, I didn't actually specifically look at it. So I don't know. I don't know how much.
00:22:00
Speaker
the Aegean Islands, their silhouettes will have changed. I mean, some of them naturally got bigger.
00:22:06
Speaker
But I don't think that any of them actually, how can we put it? Like they merged from like two islands into one because there was that much change in the sea level. But I don't honestly know. That's a good question. I can try that. I've got another, I guess, epistemological question for you here, where you're talking about the Tunisian saint. It sounds to me like he was basically following the coastline rather than sailing out in the open sea, which I guess makes sense if he's just going to the Holy Land from Tunisia.
00:22:36
Speaker
recognizable in your maps or in the data that your maps are built off of.
00:22:41
Speaker
recognizable differences between the larger ships, presumably, that would be crossing the Mediterranean, and the ones that would be doing more local routes along the coastlines.
Analyzing Ships and Trade Dynamics
00:22:52
Speaker
Well, there's a couple elements to that question that make it, it's a very good question, and there's a couple elements to consider. One is that, how can I say, sometimes we don't necessarily know the size of the ship that we're looking at when we're looking at the material on the sea floor.
00:23:10
Speaker
because, for example, a very large ship could sink, but yet we don't necessarily have all of it on the sea floor. That isn't to say that we don't have any large ships. There's some very good examples in the first centuries BC and AD of vessels that probably carried anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 AM for us.
00:23:30
Speaker
So we have a few examples of those in the Western Mediterranean. So within my data set, that's a good question. That's something I can investigate, is do I find more large vessels sailing out of sight of land as opposed to ones close to land?
00:23:47
Speaker
But also keep in mind that, and this is something related to the history of the discipline, that until, say, the past 15, 20 years, most of the investigations of archaeological sites underwater have been done close to the coastline, simply because we didn't have the technology to go into deeper water.
00:24:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So maybe a follow-up to that then, would the size of the polygon that you're doing, would that possibly be a proxy for the kind of ship that's being used? I don't think so. And also keep in mind that we have those big ships that are, say, in the late Roman Republic, the early Roman imperial period,
00:24:32
Speaker
Beyond that high point there within the set of data we have, most of the vessels that we find when they're well-preserved and we can estimate how big they are.
00:24:43
Speaker
most of the vessels we have tend to be anywhere from 10 to about 15 meters long. So that's even, say, during the Hellenistic period, the Greek period, late antiquity, Byzantine era. So there's not a whole lot of variety there in terms of size. So having said that, the size of the polygon is actually related to where the material in the archaeological site comes from.
00:25:10
Speaker
So we could have a ship that sank off the coast of Carthage, for example, but there could be material within the site that comes from Taracanensis in Spain, comes from Marseille in southern France, and comes from Ostia or Rome. So that would make a very large polygon, but the ship itself might only be 10, 14 meters long.
00:25:32
Speaker
Yeah, so that hints at other patterns of how the materials are being traded. Yeah, for sure. OK. Well, that sounds like a good place to take our final break. We'll do that and come back on the other side and wrap up this discussion back in a minute.
00:25:46
Speaker
Welcome back to Archaeotech 214, final segment. And I was wondering, we're talking about the dataset and the shipwrecks, and you mentioning the polygons are basically created based on what's at the archaeological site, which makes sense because that, you know, the contents of a shipwreck should somewhat determine where they've been because, you know, they didn't have eBay back then and Amazon, so they can't just order stuff. They got to go get it, right?
00:26:12
Speaker
And so that would make a lot of sense. I'm wondering, does your data set filter out like warships and things like that, even though they probably did have to get supplies in other places and might have things from other areas within their ship, but does it filter out warships and you're just talking about trade and merchant vessels?
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's another good question that has a whole bunch of parts to it. Within my data set, I'm simply using as much as I can from a variety of sources. So I individually am not trying to filter out, this is a warship, this is a merchant ship.
00:26:46
Speaker
But related to that, there are two other things to consider. One is that merchant ships could have a military role. So there's a hypothesis that there was a Byzantine-era ship that sank off the south coast of Turkey at a place called Yasada.
00:27:02
Speaker
There's a hypothesis that this merchant vessel was actually bringing supplies for the Byzantine army at the time. They were fighting against the Persians. If we start trying to distinguish between military vessels and cargo vessels, we run into that awkward issue.
00:27:20
Speaker
But another thing to consider is that, yes, military vessels, and say we're thinking of a very stereotypical one, like a trireme or some other board ship with everybody on board, they would still need supplies. They would need whatever for food and water.
00:27:38
Speaker
However, those ships are attacked or they're damaged, they don't necessarily sink because in some cases they're captured. Or in other cases, the reason a lot of our maritime archaeological data set is filled with what we classify as merchant vessels is because all of that heavy stuff in the ship helps it to sink.
00:28:02
Speaker
So, a trireme just has a bunch of people on board and they'll swim away if they can, and then the ship itself is either captured or it just floats and falls apart. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that does really have me thinking of a lot of different things here. But let me try to bring a little bit of coherence to my thoughts. I do like your argument of looking at these ships based off of their contents rather than
00:28:27
Speaker
I guess how normally we're presented, right? We find out about a new shipwreck and we see the news and they'll say, oh, you know, Greek shipwreck found off the coast of wherever, you know, and Roman shipwreck or whatever. But it's always starts with the culture. And that may not be particularly reflective of the materials that are on it, but it also doesn't necessarily mean who's on it. And I think of that probably brought this up last time we talked, but
00:28:50
Speaker
The shipwreck that I know best is the Uluburun shipwreck, so this is late Bronze Age, but it's taken as being emblematic of the international period at the time because it's got materials from all over the Eastern Mediterranean that went down on the same place. The other thing that I know about are the Peripolis of the Erythraean Sea, which is supposed to be written by an anonymous Greek sailor, but he talks about the different
00:29:17
Speaker
ports of call and the materials he can get and I think that if his ship were to have gone down, it would have been filled with stuff that was from the Mediterranean world as well as the Red Sea as well as all the way out to India. I think about how many vessels are registered in Liberia or any story that has sailors. These people are from this city and these people are from that country and it's a mishmash of a variety of different people.
00:29:47
Speaker
It tickles me, actually. I guess I can't think of any better way to put it, but it tickles me to think about not starting from the point of the culture, but letting that maybe develop out of the materials that are on it, and with the possibility too that there is this broader kind of maritime culture that can be interrogated.
00:30:08
Speaker
I would love to say I can take credit for that, but I certainly cannot. A variety of scholars prior to me, even in the 1970s and 80s, they were talking about maritime cultures. You can even find people doing North American archaeology that talk about maritime cultures in the 1920s and the 1930s when they're looking at indigenous communities on the coastlines of the Pacific.
00:30:36
Speaker
But I mean, what you said is, I think, appropriate because I like this idea of this maritime culture because it does step away from a lot of the disciplinary baggage that can be associated with saying the ship is Greek.
00:30:53
Speaker
is Roman, the ship is Byzantine. Because from my perspective, we're applying those labels because that's how we tend to look at ships today. Everyone has a ship registered somewhere, or at least I don't, but most people do.
00:31:09
Speaker
I have those national labels. It's very much a modern thing. And you can even see examples of this in UNESCO legislation. They talk about finding the country of origin for a particular shipwreck. And there's just so many problems associated with that.
00:31:29
Speaker
Saying that we have this maritime community and the Mediterranean Sea is the landscape or the maritime cultural landscape that they operate in, I think it gives us all these different options, all these new ways of thinking about the archaeological data set.
Future Research and Technological Integration
00:31:44
Speaker
And speaking of the archaeological dataset, do you think that this kind of a technique of polygons and heat maps built from those would be applicable to other kinds of archaeological datasets, not just shipwrecks? I think it would be. I mean, you two were asking about nomadic communities previously. I mean, it would be very interesting to look at, say, the material record left by a nomadic group somewhere as they're traveling somewhere.
00:32:10
Speaker
And then what if we try to apply the same method there? Would we find or would we create some sort of polygon or an area that roughly indicates where this group was likely moving around? I don't know. I'd love to test that.
00:32:25
Speaker
And so it could be further applicable to that kind of group. It could be further applicable in other seas around the world as well, because that's something that I think would be very interesting to do in the future, because if this method relies only upon the archaeological dataset,
00:32:43
Speaker
then it means that we don't need all the textual records to come up with that narrative. What we need is a nice size or a good sized archeological record to work with. Have you thrown AI at this like everybody else has?
00:32:59
Speaker
And I don't know if the people I contacted were just like throwing their hands up in frustration and thought, I'm not going to do this at all. Or they just looked at it and said, I don't know. I'm convinced that there's some like AI engineers who are so focused on, I don't know, doing the latest research that they don't have the time to apply it to social sciences yet. Right.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't thrown AI at it. I haven't had the chance, but I've been very lucky to talk with a guy here on campus who does computer engineering and computer sciences. Hopefully, in the next coming year, we're going to be applying a lot of new statistical modeling and analytical techniques to the data set.
00:33:42
Speaker
to really kind of pull out more subtlety or more answers about why some of the models seem to work, why some of them don't seem to work. And hopefully we can get some answers that will not only add more models to the overall narrative, but they can give us more ideas about how these people were using the sea and perhaps set up more future work.
00:34:05
Speaker
Okay. Well, that is a great segue into where does, where does this all lead now? You've written this book talking about the application of this method. What are your next steps around this? I'd love to say I have a movie in the works, but I don't. It's gotta be a Netflix series or something. Come on. I've been writing to people. No one's responding to my emails.
00:34:28
Speaker
No, the next steps I think were really prompted by the end of the previous project in which I started to realize that by modeling the activity of this maritime community, I think I'm also modeling their behavior. I'm modeling how they're using this space, the areas that they value, the areas that they're avoiding.
00:34:49
Speaker
And so for me, the next step with my research is to look at other ways of trying to model the behavior, the interests of this maritime community. So, you know, how else can I pull information out of this archaeological data set? Are there new interpretive frameworks that I can apply to find new ways of thinking about this maritime community? Because
00:35:13
Speaker
You know, they don't have really any written record. They just don't. There's nothing there. But we've got this huge, archaeological data set. So like any other community that we would classify as prehistoric, we can still come up with all kinds of information about that group. So can we do it to this group as well? And what can we learn?
00:35:33
Speaker
Awesome. Paul, any final thoughts on that? I have too many thoughts. I go down a rabbit hole myself. Right. All right. All right. Well, take a look at the show notes. We have the link to the past episode that we did episode 126 in April of 2020. And we also have a link to the book.
00:35:52
Speaker
reconstructing the maritime past. And that is available from Redledge, AKA, Taylor and Francis. And you can again, check that out. So Matthew, this has been awesome. I really look forward to see what you do next in this space, especially if you get a chance to apply this to other regions or if somebody does, that would be really great if they take your model and apply it to other maritime heavy locations, right? That would be really cool just to see how that works out.
00:36:18
Speaker
Any final things you'd like to say about this book or the topic at all before we end the show? No, no. You guys have been great. And Paul, Chris, it's always great to talk with you guys again. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you. And we will see everybody else next time. Thanks a lot.
00:36:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash Archeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:37:06
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.