Joseph LEWIS, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Arthur STARZEC, INED/UCL, France
Alexis LITVINE, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
This paper introduces a new method to model historical sailing routes based on real-world historical sailing conditions. Maritime commerce has been a major driver of European expansion and economic growth since the sixteenth-century, but very little is known of the routes used by ships transiting over the seas, which makes any calculation of speed/productivty very difficult. We show that a dynamic and multi-criteria simulation of historical routing can reveal the most likely European shipping corridors of the past and unlock new quantitative analysis of historical maritime transport networks. Furthermore, our work demonstrates the usefulness of combining dynamic environmental modelling with rigorous historical enquiry to provide key evidence where sources are lacking or unrepresentative, and create a new kind of (probabilistic) historical transport network.
By quantifying the cost of movement across a three dimensional grid, adjusted forany additional transitional costs (weights), a path representing the least-cost trajectory between any pair of points on the grid can be calculated. Least-cost path (LCP) analysis was first used in the early 1990s to model ancient routes (van Leusen 1993), and remains the key methodology for modelling land movement.
Modelling historical sea routes is in comparison a relatively recent endeavour. Con-tributions from archaeologists such as: Indruszewski and Barton (2007) on Vikingseafaring, Leidwanger (2013), Warnking (2016) and Alberti (2017) and Gal, Saaroni, and Cvikel (2021) on ancient Mediterranean sailing routes, Gustas and Supernant (2017) on North-West Pacific sailing in the late Pleistocene, Slayton (2018) on canoeing routes in fifteenth-century Caribbean, and more recently, Perttola (2021) on early seventeenth-century Southeast Asian trade routes and Blankshein (2021) are the notable exceptions. Our work goes one step further, by offering a first time-dynamic, hsitoricaly informed, multivariate model of European sailing routes.
Mots clés : Shipping routes|historical navigation|historical simulation|H-GIS|transport networks
A104956AL