agent-based models (Other Keyword)
1-4 (4 Records)
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,...
Implementing Politogenesis by Canonical Cycling in an Agent-Based Model with Circumscribed Environment (2015)
`Politogenesis'' is a fundamental social process for understanding how and why early societies increased or decreased their social and political complexity. Agent-based models (ABM) of archaeologically recorded processes of early polity formation and regional dynamics are beginning to show promising results for advancing theory and research on politogenesis, especially when ABM results can be compared with empirical patterns, such as cycling. This study investigates politogenesis in a...
Testing Social and Ecological Drivers for the Initial Spread of Agriculture on the Iberian Peninsula (2017)
Much initial research into the arrival and dissemination of agriculture in Europe has focused on identifying the speed and direction of the arrival of Neolithic subsistence. More recent work has begun to examine the chronological and spatial patterning of the spread of agriculture with the goal of identifying important sociological or environmental factors that affected the timing and location of agricultural settlement. In this context, agent-based computational modeling is emerging as a...
Using the Archaeological Record to Better Understand Models: An Australian Case Study (2017)
In Australia’s desert regions, different conceptual models are sometimes used to explain patterning in late Holocene surface deposits. Among these patterns are distributions of radiocarbon determinations, which have been concurrently explained as generated by intermittent occupation by hypermobile foragers, or growing semi-resident populations of broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers. This paper shows how models connected to the language and logic of record formation can help resolve competing...