The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project revealed a robust and striking pattern of the extreme dominance (>99%) of locally produced ceramics over six centuries and across different depositional contexts (in total over half a million pottery sherds). The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why? The project team implemented a full quantification approach during excavation, manually and digitally recording and counting all pottery and other classes of artefacts. This enabled a full analysis of trends in production and use of ceramics throughout the archaeologically documented history of Jerash and revealed the unexpected pattern of the extreme dominance of local pottery. Archaeologists formulated a set of hypotheses to explain this pattern, and we developed an agent-based model of simple customer preference driving product distribution to evaluate several explanatory factors and their potential interactions. Our simulation results reveal that preference for locally produced ceramics at Jerash might be a plausible theory, but only if its intrinsic value was considered rather high in comparison to other goods, or if it was preferred by a majority of the population, and there was a tendency to follow this majority preference (or a combination of these factors). Here, we present a complete research pipeline of a full quantification of ceramics, analysis and modelling applicable at any archaeological site. We argue that transparent methods are necessary at all stages of an archaeological project: not only for data collection, management and analysis but also in theory development and testing. By focusing on a common archaeological material and by leveraging a range of widely available computational tools, we are able to better understand local and intra-regional distribution patterns of craft products in Jerash and in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

丹麦-德国杰拉什西北区项目揭示了一个稳健而醒目的模式，即在六个世纪内以及在不同沉积环境下（总共超过五十万个陶器陶土），当地生产的陶瓷具有极端优势（> 99％）。杰拉什（Jerash）的考古学指出手工艺产品的自给度异常高：为什么？项目团队在挖掘过程中实施了完整的量化方法，对所有陶器和其他类别的文​​物进行了手动和数字记录并计数。这可以对整个考古记录的杰拉什（Jerash）历史上的陶瓷生产和使用趋势进行全面分析，并揭示出了当地陶器极度统治的意想不到的模式。考古学家提出了一系列假设来解释这种模式，我们开发了一种基于代理的简单客户偏好驱动产品分销的模型，以评估一些解释性因素及其潜在的相互作用。我们的模拟结果表明，在杰拉什（Jerash）偏爱本地生产的陶瓷可能是一个合理的理论，但前提是该陶瓷的内在价值与其他商品相比相当高，或者它是大多数人的首选，并且存在遵循这种多数偏好的趋势（或这些因素的组合）。在这里，我们提供了一个完整的研究流水线，其中包括对陶瓷的完整定量，分析和建模的适用于任何考古现场。我们认为，透明的方法在考古项目的所有阶段都是必需的：不仅是数据收集，管理和分析，还包括理论开发和测试。通过关注共同的考古材料并利用各种广泛使用的计算工具，我们能够更好地了解杰拉什和古代地中海东部地区手工艺品的局部和区域内分布模式。