AWARD SAPIENZA 2014

The project is a further attempt to apply Artificial Adaptive Systems (AAS) to the analysis of the Southern Mesopotamian Urbanism (SMU). The Urban Revolution in the Land of Sumer has been considered as a natural and cultural complex phenomenon of the IV and III mill. BC, but also the product of cognitive behavior that can be critically discussed both on the historiographical and analytical level. The complementary exploration of these two research levels underlines the strong epistemic impact of the SMU on the Ancient Near Eastern historical, political and economical reconstruction and leads to a progressive human attempt to trace the systemic complexity of the SMU (the first world urbanism) back to the mathematical simulation of cognitive complexity. The AAS as a specific algorithms set of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) are animated in the Connectionist reaction to Behaviorism and therefore are proposed here as a new analytical model to explore the systemic complexity of the Ur and Eridu urbanism through Natural Computing (NC) and Geomatic Technologies (GT). In this research, complexity has almost removed from the undisputed supremacy of external interpretation, able to be analyzed through mechanical and linear systems, and became the context of AAS experiments and simulations. The analogy between cultural complexity and the complexity of intelligence gave rise to a new system of theoretical knowledge, methods and applications linking archaeological research to the AI. The AAS application through NC to the most ancient urbanism of the world, can be considered a new frontier of the theoretical and field archaeology, but it is rooted ‘back to the future' because has been inspired by the Analytical Archaeology application of the System Theory to the complex phenomena, and moreover by the British archaeologist David Leonard Clarke pioneer approach in connecting the epistemic nature of our contemporary archaeological researches to the Cybernetic (1968).