Today’s Festival of Archaeology post highlights a recent recipient of the Open Access Archaeology Fund – an article published in Internet Archaeology last year: “Why did Cities Evolve in Gharb Al-Andalus? Network analysis as a potential method for charting city growth”.
This paper utilises statistical analysis based on Network Theory to build a network of geographical relationships between the cities of the Gharb Al-Andalus, the region of southern modern-day Portugal and central Spain under Muslim rule from the 8th to 13th centuries. Network analysis is a method of studying the relationships between entities within a network. In this paper, this approach was used to understand the influence that various cities in this region exerted on each other along communication routes and how this influence may have affected the growth of those cities.
Joel Santos, the author of this article, applied to the fund to pay for the article processing charge to publish an article in Internet Archaeology.
- Santos, J. 2022 Why did Cities Evolve in Gharb Al-Andalus? Network analysis as a potential method for charting city growth, Internet Archaeology 59. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.59.9
When asked recently about his experience with the fund, Joel said:
“The Open Access Archaeology fund was very important in my career, that is starting, since it helped me to publish my first paper in an important journal, Internet Archaeology, that otherwise it would not have been possible. That was a huge motivation to keep on going. I hope one day I can give back to the fund, so that they can help someone else to have the same opportunity that I did.”
Without access to professional funding I was advised to apply to the Open Access Archaeology Fund to assist with the cost of placing the digitised contents of several such collections with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) and was successful. The result was that these formerly private and unpublished collections are now freely accessible on the web to anyone with an interest – whether professional archaeologists or just the wider public. The fund was a great help and I would happily recommend the fund to anybody in a similar situation.”
Joel Rodrigues Santos graduated in electronics and computer engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. Following a childhood dream, he became an archaeologist and now focuses on critical analysis and theoretical debates. He is now affiliated with the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester.
