The search for a common methodology for studying the spatial dynamics of material and product circulation in ancient times.
Résumé
The Workgroup 3 of the ArchaeDyn programme, gathering 18 researchers, investigates the spatial dynamics of trade and of consumption of products during the different stages of their life cycles. Its main focus is on the spatial analysis of interconnections between quarries, workshops, areas where items were consumed or hoarded, and the ways in which they circulated or were transferred. As the principle of ArchaeDyn was to work with already built up datasets brought into the program by the participating researchers, the team was confronted by the very high heterogeneousness of these already existing databases. This article therefore presents several investigations to reduce the problems linked to the considerable differences in time and space scales, in methods of collecting and recording information and in reliability of the data distributions. In a second step, we have decided to orient our researches to the identification and the study of the places at the end of the trajectories taken by objects: consumption areas. The proposed methods are then presented through a case study about modelling the main potential areas of metal consumption during the Bronze Age in Northern France.