Iza Romanowska

I am a postgraduate research student at the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation and the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins. I received my undergraduate and Master degrees in Prehistoric and Medieval Archaeology from the Jagiellonian University (Poland) in 2008. In 2012 I obtained a Master in Philosophy in ‘Archaeology of Human Origins’ from the University of Southampton. I am currently enrolled at the Doctoral Training Centre in Complex Systems Simulation where I have completed the first taught year, an equivalent to a Master in Computer Science, and I continue my studies as a PhD student. My research is focused on the applications of computational modelling to archaeology and Palaeolithic archaeology in particular. I use a variety of simulation techniques to explore archaeological questions, test hypotheses and formalise conceptual models.

Complexity has become a new paradigm in the hard sciences in the 90s and since then it has been slowly dripping into the social sciences and humanities. It works on the premises that many systems are complex in structure, i.e. their numerous individual parts interact with each other in a non-linear way producing phenomena which cannot be easily predicted solely on the basis of their characteristics. Continue reading →