Modeling demographic and economic change in Roman Italy

This projects seeks to develop a range of scenarios of demographic and economic change in Italy in the last two centuries BCE and to examine the logical implications of rival interpretations advanced in recent scholarship with the help of computer simulations of model populations. My main collaborators are Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut) and Saskia Hin (University of Leiden and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock).

For a first publication, see now Peter Turchin and Walter Scheidel, ‘Coin hoards speak of population declines in ancient Rome’, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009), 17276-17279, and press coverage of this work.