Welcome to Project MERCURY-SIMREC

Project MERCURY-SIMREC develops and shares resources to encourage the use of computational modelling in Roman economy studies.  It provides:

  • a playable explanation of why we should model,
  • practical tutorials,
  • links to open access Roman datasets,
  • an open source model library implementing common Roman economics concepts that can be reused,
  • an exhaustive bibliography of studies applying the approach,
  • and it organises practical workshops to teach computational modelling to scholars in Roman studies at different stages of their careers.

All of these resources are used by the project team in a range of case studies that illustrate how the method can make important contributions to Roman economy studies, exploring phenomena such as Roman amphora reuse, Roman economic integration and ceramic product preference.

How you can help!

This project is a community effort! Everyone in Roman studies benefits from being able to access an up to date and elaborate archive of models, open datasets and bibliography.

Notice something is missing? Send an email to mercury.simrec@gmail.com with what model or data references should be added. The bibliography you can update yourself since it’s an open Zotero group: open access Zotero bibliography “Roman-simulations” .

Project funding

Project SIMREC is funded through a two-year Marie-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship awarded to Tom Brughmans by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (grant agreement 791948).

Project MERCURY is funded through a three-year early career Fellowship awarded to Tom Brughmans by the Leverhulme Trust (project number ECF-2016-197).