Modelling Prehistoric Mining

Mining structures are among the most complex economic systems in prehistory. Until recently, research into prehistoric production processes has strongly focused on technological reconstruction. The complexity of production processes, their interconnectedness with the surrounding socioeconomic network and issues of quantification have, quite regrettably, been addressed to a much lesser extent. Simulation can contribute important insights into the latter problem areas, however, the lack of consistent methodological discussion on data collection, model building and comparability of results still represents a significant gap in research, which we address in our work.