I just read about some very cool big data archaeology. A group of economists and historians constructed a dataset from 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, adding up to hundreds of records of trade transactions between cities. They treated trade volumes as proxies for the distance between cities, presumably calibrated using trade between pairs of cities with known locations. But many of these cities are lost to modern people, and that’s where this gets really interesting: if archaeological site A traded with lost city B, the researchers could plot a radius around A for the likely distance to B. With enough known locations, they can start to narrow down where the lost cities must be:
Source: Washington Post. Original paper: Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age.