Testing Social and Ecological Drivers for the Initial Spread of Agriculture on the Iberian Peninsula

Summary

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 sophisticated platform from which to test social and ecological drivers for the neolithization of Europe. In this case study, we use the Iberian peninsula as the setting for a computational model of Neolithic spread in order to test multiple processes that have been proposed as mechanisms for the spread of agriculture in Europe. The inclusion of state-of-the-art crop models, based on downscaled paleoclimate models allow us to more accurately simulate ecological conditions that individuals or groups may have favored when establishing a settlement in a new location. The results from these computational hypotheses are evaluated against a high resolution chronological dataset for the arrival of agriculture to the Iberian peninsula. The integration of paleoenvironmental and conceptual models provides a unique perspective for the evaluation of Neolithic spread mechanisms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Modeling People, Places, and Things: Revisiting Archaeology as Model-Based Science   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16633