Simulation (Other Keyword)
1-19 (19 Records)
Archaeologists rely heavily on contingency table analyses of count data to infer relationships between variables and proportional differences between populations. For example, archaeologists often use contingency table analyses of sample data to make inferences about inter-site variation in lithic raw material type proportions. The most common methods for making these inferences are the Chi-Square test and Fisher's Exact test. However, the former cannot be applied to small samples and the...
Can you Model my Valley? Particular People, Places and Times in Archaeological Simulation (2017)
Every archaeological modeler, whether generalist or particularist, eventually gets asked whether "their model" can help reconstruct a particular past. Could a general archaeological simulation engine be built that can be customized to answer specific questions about specific archaeological contexts, or is simulation a tool that must remain largely general and heuristic? I will argue both that it is useful to work toward a general archaeological simulation engine, and that such an engine could...
Climate, resources and strategies: simulating prehistoric populations in semi-arid environments (2015)
The aim of this study is to model resource management and decision making among hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral groups in semi-arid zones in order to explore evolutionary trajectories in relation to (a) the appearance of other specialized groups during the mid-Holocene and (b) environmental variability. The study of coexistence and interaction between groups with different subsistence strategies and land-use behaviours represents an interesting research challenge to understand socio-ecological...
Digging without Dirt: An Excavation Simulation (2015)
Efforts to simulate archaeological excavations typically include the seeding of objects in plastic tubs, sandboxes, and even cakes. Although these activities may spark excitement in students at the discovery of artifacts, they are often simple caricatures of the methods employed in actual archaeological investigations. Far worse, this treasure-hunting approach tends to reinforce the quest for "things", while also undermining key aspects of excavation that educators hope to instill, namely, the...
Embedding Artificial Intelligence in Agent-Based Models (2015)
Agent-Based Models (ABMs) have been increasingly used to study social phenomena, from the emergence of social norms to population dynamics or cultural transmission processes. Key to this method of computational simulation is the tension for explaining how macroscopic phenomena emerge from the interaction of agents behaving in a plausible manner. However, the behavior is too often encoded as a simple set of condition-action rules. We consider this kind of rule-based behaviour too simplistic,...
Environmental Variation and Technological Change: Results of an Agent-based Simulation (2017)
Computer modeling is an increasingly important aspect of evolutionary anthropology and archaeology. Computer models of change in cultural and technological forms are often highly revelatory of the ways in which large-scale evolutionary patterns arise from the local interactions between individuals. As such, the results of these models may have broad implications, both within the anthropological sciences and without. This paper details simulation results from an agent-based model of cultural...
The Impact on Mobility of Regional Variability in Rates of Environmental Change: An Agent-Based Simulation Approach (2018)
I use agent-based computer simulation to evaluate the impact of regional scale variability in rates of environmental change on residential and logistical mobility. Previous regional case studies and simulation work suggest that high variability in regional rates of environmental change (in shoreline displacement, for example) should favour settlement strategies that reduce residential mobility and rely on logistical mobility. Those strategies should select longer-term residential sites that are...
Is Wright-Fisher reproduction an appropriate null model for cultural transmission via objects? (2015)
For various reasons many archaeologists are interested in identifying what kinds of social learning operated in past societies. One approach to this problem that has proved increasingly popular since it was pioneered by Neiman in the 1990s is use of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model of reproduction as a null model for human cultural transmission. The basic idea is that a mismatch between the amount of cultural diversity predicted by the neutral allele theory and that actually observed...
Land use patterns in the arid Eurasia. Models and historical examples (2015)
The relation between the main variants of pre-industrial economic production in arid Eurasia, from nomadic pastoralism to irrigated agriculture, is known to have been unstable, with abundant examples of conflict and shifting patterns of land use right up to contemporary times. We present a brief review of our experience using Agent-Based models to identify mechanisms and system dynamics that could help explain the different land use configurations, which have been recorded archaeologically for...
Many Roman Bazaars: exploring the need for simple computational models in the study of the Roman economy (2015)
The study of the Roman economy is a battlefield of sometimes conflicting archaeological and historical models. Each model argues for different factors as the driving forces of the Roman economy. Yet the model authors rarely make explicit how their descriptions of the functioning of Roman trade can be abstracted as concepts that allow comparison with other models. Moreover, the development of these descriptive models has not gone hand in hand with the development of methods that allow for them to...
Modelling group formation in small scale societies (2015)
Several human activities require an optimal number of individuals to maximise their utility, often leading to the coexistence of positive and negative frequency dependence. This generates unstable equilibria, as group close to the optimal size will be invaded by joiners who will increase their fitness by becoming new members, leading either beneficial or detrimental effects to the incumbent members. If a group is optimally sized, incumbent member will experience a decline in fitness, while...
The Organization and Evolution of the Hohokam Economy: Agent-Based Modeling of Exchange in the Phoenix Basin, Arizona, AD 200-1450 (2013)
The Hohokam of central Arizona left behind evidence of a culture markedly different from and more complex than the small communities of O'odham farmers first encountered by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A.D. Archaeologists have worked for well over a century to document Hohokam culture history, but much about Pre-Columbian life in the Sonoran Desert remains poorly understood. In particular, the organization of the Hohokam economy in the Phoenix Basin has been an elusive...
Pre-Columbian monumentalism and social structuration: geospatial modelling of relative accessibility as a proxy for emergent territoriality among the southern proto-Jê (2015)
How did southern proto-Jê mound and enclosure complexes (MECs) in the eastern La Plata basin structure their social landscapes? MECs possess a broad geographical distribution from the banks of the Rio Paraná to the Atlantic mountains of southern Brazil, as well as a variety of configurations, relative densities, and sizes. Discussions of their functions have emphasized their implications for the perception of social inclusion/exclusion among the groups that constructed them. Archaeological...
Rethinking Experimental Archaeology: GIS and Simulation as a Hypothesis-Testing Mechanism. (2016)
More than 25 years since Allen et al. (1990), GIS has become a tool used almost as ubiquitously in archaeology as the trowel and the total station. But is it a “paradigm-shifter?” One fundamental distinction between archaeology and other scientific pursuits is the lack of a formal experimental procedure for testing large-scale hypotheses. We can work with recreated material culture or anything else on a 1:1 scale. However, ideas about larger mechanisms, particularly those that encompass wide...
Simulating Late Holocene landscape use and the distribution of stone artefacts in arid western New South Wales, Australia (2015)
The archaeological landscapes of arid environments often feature surface scatters of stone artefacts, which are used to infer past human activity and organization. For hunter-gatherer groups this typically involves some interpretation of mobility; however, the scales of activity inferred from these assemblages usually extend beyond the boundaries of study areas. Understanding what these assemblages mean in terms of human mobility requires assessment of how samples fit within a wider landscape...
Simulation and the Identification of Archaeologically-Relevant Units of Analysis in the Study of Prehistoric Cultural Transmission (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconciling the archaeological record’s coarse grain with the person-to-person information exchanges central to cultural transmission (CT) models will allow us to better tap this powerful body of theory. Previous efforts at reconciliation demonstrated that within- and between-assemblage coefficients of variation (CV) are...
Testing the Variability Selection Hypothesis on Hominin Dispersals - a Multi-agent Model Approach (2015)
The Variability Selection Hypothesis proposed by Potts (1996; 1998) postulates the evolution of behavioural plasticity among early hominins arising during periods of strong environmental fluctuations in the last 6 million years. It argues that the inconsistency in selection regimes caused by the rapid environmental fluctuations produced particularly strong selection pressure on adapting to change rather than any particular set of conditions (termed 'adaptive complexity', 'adaptive flexibility',...
Tools for Transparency and Replicability of Simulation in Archaeology (2015)
Simulation is an increasingly central tool across many theoretical frameworks but especially in evolutionary archaeology. Simulation and numerical analysis is routinely employed in hypothesis tests and model development. Simulations, however, have a well-deserved reputation as difficult to replicate and test, and it is rare that researchers beyond the authors can build upon a previously published simulation study. To improve replicability, and to make our work accessible, we employ standard...
You go first. An agent-based model of mating-migration between early farming and foraging societies (2015)
Following the introduction of agriculture, domestication and permanent settlement in the early Holocene, patrilinear and patrilocal models have become more common than matrilineal and matrilocal ones. While patrilocality is observed at the worldwide level, matrilocality has been associated to specific areas, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa. Matrilocal and patrilocal residence patterns indicate whether as a rule, a newly formed couple settles with or near the female’s or male’s parents respectively. In...