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The origin of polis is a commonly used narrative for scholars studying community formation in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially for the Hellenistic period. However, this narrative tends to favour certain ‘hellenocentric’ biases. It would be better to use a social complexity approach. Social complexity is studied here through an analysis of interactive forces steering institutional development and change on the macro-level of social organisation. The workings of some of these forces are presented here through some examples from the material culture of Sagalassos and Düzen Tepe, two nearby settlements located in Pisidia in Southwest Anatolia. The presented argument illustrates the potential of this type of research and is to serve as a first step towards a full examination of social complexity in past societies.

The continued importance of pottery studies for the development of the
archaeological discipline can hardly be overstated. In this paper, we discuss the pottery found at the settlement at Düzen Tepe (SW Anatolia), following the template of the well-established typological and fabric identification practices developed by the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project for the Sagalassos Red Slip Ware production from Roman imperial times. A newly devised typology of the late Achaemenid to early Hellenistic (5th to 2nd centuries BCE) material of Düzen Tepe is presented. Comparisons with parallels in pottery material indicate that this material was firmly embedded in a (southwestern) Anatolian framework, generally matching a chronological window from the fourth to third centuries BCE.

The Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project has a long-standing tradition in excavations and material studies of the town of Sagalassos and its wider territory, focusing mainly on Roman imperial and late Antique times. In recent years, additional efforts have been spent at studying the earlier phases of the origin of town. This paper presents a small body of ceramics that can unequivocally be considered the oldest material found at the site, ascribed to the late Achaemenid period (late fifth to fourth centuries BCE). Similarities in typology and fabric can be noted with the nearby contemporary site at Düzen Tepe. The nature of the contexts associated with this material provide tentative indications for the importance of activities related to clay quarrying and agriculture for the small community at Sagalassos during this period of time.

Amphorae have traditionally been regarded as ideal proxies for reconstructing contacts between sites within socio-economic networks, because of their intrinsic functionality as transport vessels of agricultural produce. Taking abstraction of exact provenance and trade routes, they also generically represent material attestations for participation in wider trade networks. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of a small number of fragments that can be considered the oldest attestations of amphora fragments, dated to the middle/late Hellenistic (c. 200-25 BCE) and early Roman imperial (25 BCE – 100 CE) periods, found at the archaeological site of Sagalassos, located in ancient Pisidia in southwest Anatolia. The proposed outer date of
arrival of the oldest of these fragments coincides with a phase of development of the urban fabric of Sagalassos and its associated material culture. It is suggested that the appearance of amphorae at Sagalassos and the associated participation in wider trade networks is one attestation of a wider transition phase, signifying a shift from the primordial roles of individual households towards the workings of the newly developing urban community as a whole.

Complexity science refers to the theoretical research perspectives and the formal modelling tools designed to study complex systems. A complex system consists of separate entities interacting following a set of (often simple) rules that collectively give rise to unexpected patterns featuring vastly different properties than the entities that produced them. In recent years a number of case studies have shown that such approaches have great potential for furthering our understanding of the past phenomena explored in Roman Studies. We argue complexity science and formal modelling have great potential for Roman Studies by offering four key advantages: (1) the ability to deal with emergent properties in complex Roman systems ; (2) the means to formally specify theories about past Roman phenomena; (3) the power to test aspects of these theories as hypotheses using formal modelling approaches; and (4) the capacity to do all of this in a transparent, reproducible, and cumulative scientific framework. We present a ten-point manifesto that articulates arguments for the more common use in Roman Studies of perspectives, concepts and tools from the broader field of complexity science, which are complementary to empirical inductive approaches. There will be a need for constant constructive collaboration between Romanists with diverse fields of expertise in order to usefully embed complexity science and formal modelling in Roman Studies.

Analyses of ancient food webs reveal important paleoecological processes and responses to a range of perturbations throughout Earth's history, such as climate change. These responses can inform our forecasts of future biotic responses to similar perturbations. However, previous analyses of ancient food webs rarely accounted for key differences between modern and ancient community data, particularly selective loss of soft-bodied taxa during fossilization. To consider how fossilization impacts inferences of ancient community structure, we (1) analyzed node-level attributes to identify correlations between ecological roles and fossilization potential and (2) applied selective information loss procedures to food web data for extant systems. We found that selective loss of soft-bodied organisms has predictable effects on the trophic structure of "artificially fossilized" food webs because these organisms occupy unique, consistent food web positions. Fossilized food webs misleadingly appear less stable (i.e., more prone to trophic cascades), with less predation and an overrepresentation of generalist consumers. We also found that ecological differences between soft-and hard-bodied taxa-indicated by distinct positions in modern food webs-are recorded in an early Eocene web, but not in Cambrian webs. This suggests that ecological differences between the groups have existed for ≥48 Myr. Our results indicate that accounting for soft-bodied taxa is vital for accurate depictions of ancient food webs. However, the consistency of information loss trends across the analyzed food webs means it is possible to predict how the selective loss of soft-bodied taxa affects food web metrics, which can permit better modeling of ancient communities.