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Large-scale computational approaches to medieval town formation in Mediterranean Europe
 | Email: gwendoline.rouault.20@ucl.ac.uk |
- Profile
From the 12th century CE onwards, Mediterranean Europe witnessed a proliferation of towns, with a range of models having so far been used to try to understand town formation processes at different times in different regions. Similarities and variations in these urban processes have been acknowledged on a macro and local scale, however, diverging urban trajectories are not always well understood. While extensive deep dives into these emerging urban formations exist, as yet there is no attempt to study these developments from the perspective of a large scale, formal analysis, the scope of which would require innovative data collection and synthesis. This project will focus on the following research questions:
- To what extent was the formation of towns consistent in terms of pattern and process across Mediterranean Europe during the medieval period?
- What insights can be gained on town formation processes at both a macro (Mediterranean Europe) and regional scale (France, Spain and Italy)?
- How inter-connected was the network of towns, and what role did this network have in the growth and spread of towns throughout the landscape?
- How do in depth case studies fit within the broader Mediterranean picture of medieval town formation?
- How effective is LiDAR in enabling the collection of large-scale, accurately geolocated, coarse-grained data of medieval sites across Mediterranean Europe?
Open-access LiDAR data have recently been collected in Europe by the Italian, French and Spanish governments and can be accessed in both processed and raw formats. I intend to use LiDAR-based and data science methods to collect the necessary data about medieval sites in this region, alongside data from existing catalogues of archaeological sites and historical records. I will subsequently subject this fresh evidence to a statistical and computational treatment to formally characterise distributions of medieval towns and understand the socio-economic basis for their development.
Funding
UCL Research Excellence Scholarship
Education
- BA, Classics, University of Cambridge, 2019
- MSc, Computational Archaeology: GIS, Data Science and Complexity, UCL, 2022
