Past movement systems represent the material remnants of a past society's socio-political and economic interactions. While qualitative studies have expanded significantly, quantitative approaches have yet to fully leverage computational advances to better understand the formation and development of these movement systems. This special issue contextualises the collected papers within a broader ‘quantitative study of past movement systems’ overview. We identify four ‘Grand Challenges’ designed to transition the study of past movement systems from descriptive toward a predictive, validated science. We argue that without a commitment to open data and a simulation-based approach, model validation remains hindered, increasing the risk of biased inferences and inaccurate historical narratives. By addressing these challenges, the field can establish a robust empirical and methodological foundation from which the socio-political organisation and political economy of past societies may be reconstructed.

This paper outlines a project that is building a model for assessing multicultural interaction, which will be used for the study of the expansion of Rome in central Italy in the wider context of Latin colonisation. Its theoretical framework incorporates Social Identity Theory and the concept of mental distance applied to geographically related groups. The key materials studied at this stage are funerary architecture and inscriptions, which reveal different nested aspects of group identities. Here we briefly present the local context of the study – Nepi and the Faliscan area – with the different languages and alphabets used in the area. This area will be compared with its neighbouring areas in order to analyse long-term changes in group identities from the precolonial period to the colonial period.

This article presents the Stockholm Volterra Project and its developments since 2013. This project, run by Stockholm University and the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, has carried out geophysical prospections in Volterra in collaboration with Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Pisa e Livorno. The aims and methods of the project are outlined together with a closer presentation of key sites from 2014 and 2015: the ‘Football Pitch’, the area in front of the church of San Giusto, the ruined church of Santo Stefano, the amphitheatre and Ortino sites.