Research

Cultural evolution

I am particularly interested in how human populations interacted and changed in the past by analysing the diversity of cultural expressions in the archaeological record. Culture is transmitted vertically - we inherit cultural traits by our parents, our teachers, our customs - but it is also transmitted horizontally, influenced by other member of the society we are part of, as well as by factors such as social status, identity and individual technical skills. With all these things affecting how cultures change and spread, it is no mystery that we do not have a good way to model the spread of culture yet.

Part of my work in recent years has been to use ecological concepts to model the movement of humans in the Neolithic, and then superpose to this structure a system that regulates how culture is exchanged. In particular, I am interested in how population structure (that is, the way in which humans were distributed over a territory and the way in which they interacted) played a role in the evolution of culture, and how these mechanisms are reflected in the archaeological record.

Maritime encounters and ancient navigation

As part of the Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH), I lent my knowledge of agent-based modelling to the Maritime Encounters project, which aims at studying the importance of the sea for the social fabric during the Scandinavian Bronze Age (1700-500 BC) and earlier. My collaborators established possible navigation routes that allowed Scandinavian populations to maintain a large and vibrant trade network. We merged modern climatological data with naval engineering numerical models to infer how seafaring took place up to 4000 years ago. Additionally, I contributed to the interpretation of results, and - in a twist of my destiny as a theoretician - I took part in field experiments to test the performance of boats built using ancient methods (such as skin boats and logboats). This work led to the publication of my software Pytheas simulator, an agile ABM implementation to study ancient navigation.

Today, I remain interested in maritime themes and continue my work to simulate navigation. In particular, I am developing methods to include individual choices into the navigation process, and to better account for the extensive skills that allowed ancient navigators to get out at sea.

Cultural Heritage and 3D applications

I harbor a strong interest in how to improve 3D documentation techniques, and make them available not only for documentation but for further analysis. I have experience with the management of multimodal data that include 3D objects, and I was one of the main backend responsibles for some of the projects developed at the Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH), such as - among other projects - the Saint Sophia’s Inscriptions portal and the Etruscan Chamber Tombs portal. The former is a portal for the digital conservation and study of the graffitis on the walls of the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv; the latter is a portal for the exploration of visual data collected in and around the Etruscan tombs in San Giovenale, Italy.

Beyond the documentation of cultural heritage, I think of how digital 3D objects can be used beyond the scope of documentation, for example to explore sensory perceptions in the ancient world. Additionally, I work on the streamlining of the 3D acquisition process from data collection to exploitation.

Addendum: Evolutionary biology

Before getting into digital humanities, I built an academic career studying population genetics, which can be considered as the mathematical theory upon which theoretical evolutionary biology is built. In my 8 years in the field (a PhD plus two postdocs contracts) I worked on different topics: in particular evolutionary rescue, isolation by distance and range expansions. Evolutionary rescue refers to when a population (loosely defined as a group of individuals exchanging genetic material) facing extinction survives due to a new beneficial mutation spreading in the population. Isolation by distance refers to a genetic pattern that can be seen when observing the individual DNAs of many different individuals of a population spread over a large territory: in general, one would expect that the farther away two indivduals can be found, the more genetic differences their genomes will harbor between themselves. Finally, range expansions occur when a population expands over a territory: this causes genetic changes at the front of the population expansion that we can quantify and study. In all these topics, my focus was in understanding the impacts of spatial structures (e.g. metapopulations) and dispersal on the evolutionary changes. Nowadays, I use this knowledge to understand cultural evolution.

I don’t consider myself a biologist anymore, but I will always harbor a deep interest for these topics.