Atlas of Potential Sailing Mobility from the Neolithic Period to Late Antiquity: Research Data
Description
The data sets in this repository are measures of potential sailing mobility for merchant ships, primarily of the period between the Middle Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Two mappings of Neolithic Period sailing mobility are also included. The measures of sailing mobility are the product of a toolkit and methods developed at the University of Haifa, and they serve to assist researchers in the analysis of ancient maritime connectivity, including provision of quantitative inputs needed for network analyses and historic economic modelling. The underlying premise was that (a) period ships had limited windward sailing ability (b) the variabilities typical to Mediterranean winds were the key drivers of sailing mobility primarily when a sailing passage lies contrary to prevailing winds; (c) these variabilities can be resolved by using a large modern meteorological data set (15 years) at high spatio-temporal resolution, but they are lost if averaged climatic data sets are used; and (d) palaeoclimatological examination has shown that the wind patterns in the Mediterranean have not changed in the last 3000 years and more. Sailing passages are reconstructed throughout the meteorological data set using regatta weather-routing software reducing the meteorological data from the order of billions of records to millions of sailing records. These are further reduced by statistical methods to obtain metrics of potential sailing mobility for each passage. These metrics appear in data sheets for both direct sailing passages and for breeze-assisted coastal sailing. The ancient mariners' limits of reasonability are also modelled in the process of determining practical potential sailing mobility. Each of the direct passage data sheets summarises 5,479 simulated daily sailings performed on each direct passage. The data sections include measures of mobility, sailing characteristics, including distribution of points-of-sail, and the environment encountered in the simulated sailing passages. The tools to produce additional mappings are continuously maintained. This atlas of sailing mobility mappings is constantly growing and is updated several times a year. Changes in version 8: 1. Additional potential mobility mappings have been added to the data, now totalling 1030 direct passages representing more than five million simulated sailings. 2. New index maps and lists of passages have been created. 3. There are changes to the folder structure. All datasets are in 11 top level folders without any subfolders.