Approaches to Data Scarcity in Ancient History

This workshop seeks to combine social scientific and humanistic approaches to the ancient world. It will explore the ways in which methods drawn from network theory, statistics, and anthropology can inform debates over data, specifically data scarcity, in Antiquity and subsequent periods of history. In addition to the rich documentary and textual sources available to scholars of Classics, Mediterranean archaeology has produced impressive datasets in recent years. Ancient historians and archaeologists have begun to systematize the collection and publication of this data, but a key premise of this workshop is that we must complicate our understanding of social scientific models and their implications to better use these emerging datasets. We envision a collaboration with the Stanford Archaeology Center and with the History and Anthropology departments at Stanford in order to move towards a better integration of textual and archaeological evidence, as well as the incorporation of other forms of quantifiable data related to the study of the past.