Abstract
Movement and routeways are the principle ways in which we explore, learn and exploit the world around us. For studies of the past, an understanding of how movement occurred is essential to adequately address archaeological material. The models used in this research can be used to identify potential ancient routeways which can improve our understanding of the landscape and contextualise archaeological remains. Comparison with known routeways also allows us to learn about the decision-making process of people in the past and how they negotiated the landscape. ArcGIS and NetLogo are used to demonstrate the cumulative process which leads to the creation and evolution of routeways over time in a series of actions that approaches efficiency. The environment of North Offaly in the Irish Midlands is used as the study area, as it is a landscape of natural routeways and obstacles for which we have rich archaeological and documentary evidence supporting interpretation of movement spanning prehistory and historical periods.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been funded by the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and the Galway Doctoral Research Scholarship. The authors are grateful to Conor McDermott, University College Dublin, for providing survey data from the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, and to Alan Cunningham for comments on original drafts. Road data is © Open Street Map and Contributors CC-BY-SA.
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O’Brien, Y., Bergh, S. (2016). Modelling Routeways in a Landscape of Esker and Bog. In: Barceló, J., Del Castillo, F. (eds) Simulating Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_6
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