Atlas of Potential Sailing Mobility from the Neolithic Period to Late Antiquity: Research Data

The data sets in this repository are measures of potential sailing mobility for merchant ships, primarily of the period between the Middle Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Two mappings of Neolithic Period sailing mobility are also included. The measures of sailing mobility are the product of a toolkit and methods developed at the University of Haifa, and they serve to assist researchers in the analysis of ancient maritime connectivity, including provision of quantitative inputs needed for network analyses and historic economic modelling. The underlying premise was that (a) period ships had limited windward sailing ability (b) the variabilities typical to Mediterranean winds were the key drivers of sailing mobility primarily when a sailing passage lies contrary to prevailing winds; (c) these variabilities can be resolved by using a large modern meteorological data set (15 years) at high spatio-temporal resolution, but they are lost if averaged climatic data sets are used; and (d) palaeoclimatological examination has shown that the wind patterns in the Mediterranean have not changed in the last 3000 years and more. Sailing passages are reconstructed throughout the meteorological data set using regatta weather-routing software reducing the meteorological data from the order of billions of records to millions of sailing records. These are further reduced by statistical methods to obtain metrics of potential sailing mobility for each passage. These metrics appear in data sheets for both direct sailing passages and for breeze-assisted coastal sailing. The ancient mariners' limits of reasonability are also modelled in the process of determining practical potential sailing mobility. Each of the direct passage data sheets summarises 5,479 simulated daily sailings performed on each direct passage. The data sections include measures of mobility, sailing characteristics, including distribution of points-of-sail, and the environment encountered in the simulated sailing passages. The tools to produce additional mappings are continuously maintained. This atlas of sailing mobility mappings is constantly growing and is updated several times a year. Changes in version 8: 1. Additional potential mobility mappings have been added to the data, now totalling 1030 direct passages representing more than five million simulated sailings. 2. New index maps and lists of passages have been created. 3. There are changes to the folder structure. All datasets are in 11 top level folders without any subfolders.本仓库所收录的数据集，为青铜时代中期至古代晚期商船的潜在航行机动性量化指标，同时还包含两份新石器时代航行机动性测绘成果。 此类航行机动性指标由海法大学（University of Haifa）开发的工具集与研究方法生成，旨在辅助研究者开展古代海上连通性分析，包括为网络分析与历史经济建模提供必要的量化输入数据。 本研究的核心前提包括：其一，该时期船舶的逆风航行能力有限；其二，地中海典型风场的多变性是影响航行机动性的核心驱动因素，尤其当航行航线与盛行风向相悖时；其三，此类风场多变性可通过采用高时空分辨率（spatio-temporal resolution）、时长15年的现代大型气象数据集得以还原，但若使用平均气候数据集则会丢失相关信息；其四，古气候学（palaeoclimatological）研究表明，近3000年来地中海的风场模式未发生显著变化。 研究人员借助赛艇赛事天气航线规划软件（regatta weather-routing software），对全气象数据集覆盖范围内的航行航线进行重建，将数十亿条原始气象记录精简为数百万条航行记录；随后通过统计方法进一步处理数据，以获取每条航线的潜在航行机动性指标。此类指标分为直达航线与顺风辅助沿岸航行两类，均收录于对应数据表中。在确定实际潜在航行机动性的过程中，研究团队还对古代航海者的合理航行极限进行了建模。 每份直达航线数据表均汇总了对应直达航线的5479次单日模拟航行数据。数据章节涵盖机动性指标、航行特征（包括帆向姿态分布）以及模拟航行过程中遭遇的航行环境。 用于生成额外测绘成果的工具集仍在持续维护中。本航行机动性测绘图集的规模正不断扩大，每年均会更新数次。 版本8更新内容如下： 1. 新增多组潜在机动性测绘数据集，目前直达航线总数已达1030条，对应模拟航行总量超500万次。 2. 新增航线索引地图与航线清单。 3. 调整文件夹结构：所有数据集均收纳于11个顶级文件夹中，无次级子文件夹。