In his 2003 book, Historical Dynamics (ch. 4), Turchin describes and briefly analyzes a spatial ABM of his metaethnic frontier theory, which is essentially a formalization of a theory by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century. In the model, polities compete with neighboring polities and can absorb them into an empire. Groups possess “asabiya”, a measure of social solidarity and a sense of shared purpose. Regions that share borders with other groups will have increased asabiya do to salient us vs. them competition. High asabiya enhances the ability to grow, work together, and hence wage war on neighboring groups and assimilate them into an empire. The larger the frontier, the higher the empire’s asabiya.
As an empire expands, (1) increased access to resources drives further growth; (2) internal conflict decreases asabiya among those who live far from the frontier; and (3) expanded size of the frontier decreases ability to wage war along all frontiers. When an empire’s asabiya decreases too much, it collapses.  Another group with more compelling asabiya eventually helps establish a new empire.

UPDATE in V1.1.0: missing input data files added; relative paths to input data files changed to “../data/FILENAME”

A model that allows for representing key theories of Roman amphora reuse, to explore the differences in the distribution of amphorae, re-used amphorae and their contents.

This model generates simulated distributions of prime-use amphorae, primeuse contents (e.g. olive oil) and reused amphorae. These simulated distributions will differ between experiments depending on the experiment’s variable settings representing the tested theory: variations in the probability of reuse, the supply volume, the probability of reuse at ports. What we are interested in teasing out is what the effect is of each theory on the simulated amphora distributions.

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This model is an extended version of the original MERCURY model (https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/ ) . It allows for experiments to be performed in which empirically informed population sizes of sites are included, that allow for the scaling of the number of tableware traders with the population of settlements, and for hypothesised production centres of four tablewares to be used in experiments.

Experiments performed with this population extension and substantive interpretations derived from them are published in:

Hanson, J.W. & T. Brughmans. In press. Settlement scale and economic networks in the Roman Empire, in T. Brughmans & A.I. Wilson (ed.) Simulating Roman Economies. Theories, Methods and Computational Models. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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This is extended version of the MERCRUY model (Brughmans 2015) incorporates a ‘transport-cost’ variable, and is otherwise unchanged. This extended model is described in this publication: Brughmans, T., 2019. Evaluating the potential of computational modelling for informing debates on Roman economic integration, in: Verboven, K., Poblome, J. (Eds.), Structural Determinants in the Roman World.

Brughmans, T., 2015. MERCURY: an ABM of tableware trade in the Roman East. CoMSES Comput. Model Libr. URL https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/