The diffusion of technology during the last five millennia

Project Summary

Technology diffusion is often considered to be one of the most important drivers of economic growth, but its drivers and quantitative importance is still not well understood. In this project we study technology diffusion over the very long run, and through the lens of a vast newly created database of records of artefacts in museum collections. Each record contains information on a date, a place (findspot or production place), as well as information about technology embodied in the object through description of the item or its materials. We harmonize and code dates and locations using gazetteers assembled by scholars in the digital humanities. To reduce the dimensionality of object descriptions, we use NLP techniques to link the materials, techniques, and objects to entities from controlled vocabularies. Preliminary results show that the approach scales well and is able to match the emergence of several key technologies in human history. Ultimately, our objective is to study the change in the spatial distributions of technologies in relation to trade, migration, and political changes.

Johannes Boehm