Project areas

Interdisciplinarity is ubiquitous in modern historical scholarship today and an almost mandatory prerequisite for developing new methods and insights into given historical questions. Especially in the field of ancient economic history, historical scholarship is dependent on new methods due to the often postulated relative scarcity of classical literary sources.

The long-term project “Maritime Connections and their Influence on Ancient Maritime Trade – Nautical Simulations as a Basis for Historical Research” for the creation of the digital maritime atlas’ comprises different research and project areas due to its interdisciplinary orientation. In the project, simulation engineers, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, physicists, historians, and archaeologists are working closely together to create a historical-geographical information system from the various fields, which will allow the analysis of maritime trade and its framework – especially the potential of historical sea routes – in a depth and precision that has not been possible before.

The long-term project can be roughly divided into the following project components: