Archaeologists, like most people, have an urge to grasp the world through something tangible or, even better, countable. There can be a great comfort in numbers, and numbers also convince; many have been the attempts to define cities by countable characteristics: an area of at least 10ha, 10,000 inhabitants, a certain number of public meeting places, a particular thickness of city walls in metres. Five, ten, or twelve ticks on a checklist of features, and so on.
Attempting full quantification and counting ‘stuff’ have long been hot stuff in archaeological scholarship. Admittedly, we do it ourselves. Having hard, numeric data about physical things of all kinds and tracking their distribution over time and space gives researchers a sense that they have a grip on what was going on in the past. Doubters can be presented with copious statistics and graphs that back up hypotheses. Unquestionably, then, numbers are reassuring and persuasive. At the same time, of course, the certainty that numbers seem to offer can be deceptive.
The ancient Greek city-states are one set of sites that became the target of a major counting operation in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were part of an initiative, too, that sought to characterise them as a phenomenon much broader than one simply restricted to the Classical Mediterranean region. Instead, there was a heavy focus on explaining to the broader academic world why ancient Archaic and Classical city-states were important for understanding the development of humanity as well.
Archaeology as immersive historical simulation