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An Interdisciplinary Study of the Creation of Perceptual Map Layers for Predictive Modeling in a Geographic Information System (GIS): A Case Study of the Roman Roads in the Eastern Desert of Egypt

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dorianne Abra Gould, B.A., M.A.

Brandeis University, 1989

University of Arkansas, 1998

September 2001

University of Arkansas

This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council

Dissertation Director:

Dr. Fred Limp

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Doug Bird

Dr. Mounir Farah

Dr. Dave Fredrick

Dr. Margaret Reid

Introduction

To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.--Old Yiddish Proverb

A dissertation should be allowed to be an experiment--Margaret Reid, Dissertation Committee

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." "Live by the computer, die by the computer"--"Fredisms"-Fred Limp, Dissertation Committee Chair

This study is in partial fulfillment of the doctoral degree in Environmental Dynamics (ENDY), "the study of complex interactions between natural systems and human activity." This new program "requires an interdisciplinary research approach and integration with the power, efficiency, and economy of advanced computer-based technologies." (http://www.uark.edu:80/depts/endy/) Within the context of this nontraditional approach to graduate studies, a nontraditional presentation of a graduate dissertation was done. This dissertation is presented in a similar context as the one proposed by Harnad who hopes "the learned serial literature will be available everywhere, for everyone, for free, forever, as it always would have been, but for the tyranny of print on paper in the Gutenberg Era" (quoted in Denning 1997).

What follows is a behavioral study of the Roman transportation network in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Why did the Romans build the roads that they did? Why did they not just pave the existing Pharaonic roads through the desert, as they did in other provinces, rather than expand it with no paving? Why did some roads go out of use and others continue? Why did the Romans use the roads to transport imported goods across the desert and Red Sea Mountains rather than sail to the tip of the Red Sea and just cross the small bit of desert to the Mediterranean? Through the analytical model, insight is gained into these questions.

At the center of this research is the physical manifestation of the Roman transportation network in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Directly connected to this transportation network is its reason for being: the transportation and supply of the army, the transportation of luxury goods from India (and other eastern countries) via Egypt to Rome, and the transportation of the quarried and mined goods from the Eastern Desert to Rome. In order to do all of these activities, the Romans expanded the existing network of roads. These are facts, interesting in of themselves, but they are descriptive. In a traditional doctoral program in archaeology, the detailed description of this complex transportation network could be a dissertation. In the ENDY program, however, emphasis is on the interactions between the environment and human activity. The interaction question in this study is why the Romans built the roads where they did--why choose the locations they did to build the road?

Several factors led to the decisions of road placement: Roman and Egyptian science and technology, Roman attitudes and beliefs, the existing roads and facilities built by the Ptolemies and the Pharaohs, the natural resources in the Eastern Desert as well as its constraints, and the attitudes and beliefs of the native populations in the desert. These factors could be described, and that each could also be a dissertation in a traditional doctoral program. But the research in ENDY requires integration with the advanced computer-based technologies. In this study, the computer-based technology is GIS. In order to integrate the attitudes and beliefs of the Romans and the native populations with GIS, the descriptions must change from textual representation to numeric representation.

In order to change the descriptions of attitudes and beliefs to numbers, models of the complex interplay of environmental, cultural, and technological factors were created. How to represent attitudes and beliefs in numeric form could also be a dissertation, but the ENDY program also requires the study be based in a specific region, thus the Eastern Desert of Egypt was chosen. To create these models I used theories from several schools of thought: Feminist Geography, Human Behavioral Ecology, Classical Archaeology, Anthropological Archaeology, and Economic Anthropology. Any of these schools of thought could be applied singly to the research for an insightful study. ENDY research, however, must be interdisciplinary.

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