Science reports:

There’s a lot more than just raw materials within the medicines in your bathroom cabinet or the watch on your wrist. These objects are also packed with knowledge, which is why they can only be produced by complex economies with the right mix of know-how, infrastructure, and technology.

A new analysis of Roman gravestones, presented at the NetSci conference in Maastricht, Netherlands, on 4 June, suggests this kind of knowledge tends to stick in place—even over thousands of years. Using a metric called economic complexity, which captures the knowledge within an economy based on what it produces, researchers found that economically complex regions in ancient Rome also tend to be complex in modern times. The results, which have not yet been peer reviewed, were met with skepticism by some classicists who weren’t involved with the work.

A team of network scientists and archaeologists reconstructed economic complexity across the Roman empire from the first century B.C.E. to the fifth century C.E. using epitaphs, which often recorded the professions of the deceased.

This kind of analysis was made possible by 500,000 digitized Latin inscriptions from across the Roman empire, published by a team of Danish and Czech researchers last year. Many of these records are funerary inscriptions, says Tom Brughmans, a classical archaeologist at Aarhus University who contributed to the new work. Based on about 10,000 mentions of 514 different occupations—including 179 traders (negotiator), 1934 managers (curator), and 421 scribes (scriba)—the team created a network of ancient professions connected to Roman provinces where they appeared. The team then derived a second network that connected different jobs together if they tended to co-occur in the same provinces, which they used to calculate the economic complexity across ancient Rome.

The analysis suggests there’s something “sticky” about the conditions that allow an economy to support diverse, specialized industries. “The fact that you get anything but noise over 2000 years is pretty interesting,” says network scientist Michele Coscia of the IT University of Copenhagen, who presented the findings. [Continue reading…]