Professor of Ancient History at the University of Barcelona José Remesal, has been selected as a recipient of an Advanced Grant by the EPNET Project (Production and distribution of food During the Roman Empire: economic and political dynamics), linking physics with history, in order to investigate the dynamics of trade during the Roman Empire. The project stems from one of the most important databases that exist on amphorae and epigraphy and its the result of the work carried out for twenty years by the Center for the Study of Provincial Interdependence to Classical Antiquity (CEIPAC) of the UB, whose records consist of 36,000 entries with an average of fifteen items of information for each record.

Parallel to this, Dr. Albert Diaz Guilera and his research group of fundamental physics, PhysComp, is responsible for creating theoretical models of networks and computer simulations that will be used to extract information from the database in order to formulate and validate hypotheses about the political and economic mechanisms of the Roman world.