Resumen de From multi- to interdisciplinarity: a view from archaeology
Archaeology has been one of the disciplines in humanities most pressed for multidisciplinary approaches. Partially due to the nature of the data and partially be cause of the general paucity of it, archaeologists have always worked very closely with researchers from outside of their profession to squeeze the most of the little information there is about ancient societies. We get fellow geomorphologists to look at the soil profiles, osteoarchaeologists to analyse the bones and physicists to date the finds, etc. However, this kind of collaboration often does not extend beyond a “customer – service provider” type of relationship, in which members of one discipline use their skills and knowledge to provide a service to another, for example, to establish the most probable age of a sample using a particular dating technique. Although useful and necessary this is hardly a model for ‘transdisciplinarity’.
Throughout this piece the word “multidisciplinarity” is understood as this kind of collaboration – using the expertise of other disciplines to perform a specific service such as an analysis of the particular type of data. In contrast, the term “inter-” and “transdisciplinary” is used here to mean a much closer and mutually dependent type of working together towards a common goal. An interdisciplinary team aims to work out a problem together by applying, developing and adapting tools of different disciplines in a synthetic manner. This type of collaboration formed the spine of a recently concluded ERC-funded EPNet project: “Production and Distribution of Food during the Roman Empire: Economic and Political Dynamics” (ERC-2013-ADG 340828). Led by prof. J. Remesal Rodríguez – the head of CEIPAC group (CEIPAC 2019) at the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Barcelona, Spain, it united historians, archaeologists, network scientists and specialist in computer simulation to try to understand how commerce of foodstuff shaped the economy of the Roman Empire. The ambitious goal was to use the existing archaeological datasets, and in particular, the epigraphic dataset collected over the last two decades by CEIPAC (romanopendata, 2019), to validate or reject existing hypotheses regarding the functioning and organisation of Roman trade. The project ran for five years between 2014-2019 and employed over 15 researchers at different stages of their academic career based at three research institutions (University of Barcelona, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Siris Academics) (Remesal et al., 2015). Here, we present a few ‘lessons learnt’ in the five years of this collaborative interdisciplinary project.
