Meet and greet: squares in secondary agglomerations of the north-western Roman provinces

“Meet and greet” is a collaborative binational DFG-funded project that aims to study public squares in secondary agglomerations (smaller settlements) in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire. It brings together three disciplines: Archaeology of the Roman Provinces (University of Cologne), Archaeological Science (University of Basel), and Computational Archaeology (University of Cologne). Within the framework of Meet&Greet, Computational Archaeology aims at investigating the use and function of open public spaces using computational methods that draw from developments in the field of urban studies, and especially approaches that fall within the scope of the “Science of Cities” (SoC). The SoC is an interdisciplinary field of research that uses computational and quantitative methods to explore urban phenomena, building strongly on complexity science, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, urban geography, and network science. In the context of the project computational approaches, such as spatial interaction models, drawing from entropy-maximising methods, and network analysis, are used to examine why and how public spaces such as Fora (and their associated public buildings) were constructed in certain secondary agglomerations rather than other similar settlements, as well as the social and economic roles of these spaces and amenities.