Evan Drow
Pronouns: He/Him/His
UROP Fellowship: Community College Summer Fellowship Program
Northwestern Michigan College
Research Mentor(s): Andrew Cabaniss, PhD Candidate
Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology
Presentation Date: Thursday, July 30, 2020 | Session 3 | Presenter: 5
Authors: Evan Drow
Abstract
Over 1800 years ago, a pandemic known as the Antonine Plague devastated the Roman Empire, heavily disrupting society while taking the lives of an estimated seven to ten million people. A lack of historical documentation has made understanding the impact of this mortality crisis challenging, but recovered Roman-Egyptian census papyri from the same time period offer hope. Census return data has been utilized by Andrew Cabaniss in creating an agent-based model (ABM) in the Python coding language aimed at running simulations of Roman-period Egyptian society to examine household demography. This ABM allows users to easily customize parameters such as initial simulation burn-in period, initial population size, number of households and communities, and scheduling of life events in order to quickly test hypotheses, draw conclusions, and visualize results of experiments.
The goal of this project is to explore how mortality crises, specifically pandemics, influenced ancient demographic outcomes under unique variations of starting parameters and how they affected population over time, household structure, household size, and the number of occupied residencies. A mortality crisis has been implemented within the main code of the ABM with the ability to alter parameters of starting year, duration, and how deadliness of the crisis covaries with household size. In the future, the functionality of the mortality crisis can be adapted to include aspects such as spatial parameters, which would greatly enhance the realism of simulations and their results. Furthermore, as planned expansions such as the introduction of professions, incomes, and expenses are effectively implemented, long-term economic outcomes on multiple levels would have the possibility of being investigated in light of, for example, a plague. By advancing the current plague simulation, it will become increasingly useful as a tool in producing plausible historical data which could then be used in either researching the comparisons between pandemics of the past with those that affect us today or how our understanding of ancient pandemics like the Antonine Plague may align or misalign with current consensuses.
Google Slide Presentation
Presentation Script
Research Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
