Emergent Landscapes: Simulating the Distribution of Residential Features in a Hawaiian Dryland Agricultural System

Summary

Cultivation in the Leeward Kohala Field System (Hawai‘i Island) required sufficient rainfall for crops to flourish. Periodic droughts restricted production to upper elevations where orographic rainfall was higher and more dependable, likely influencing the labour needs and settlement patterns of resident populations. We employ a series of spatially-explicit agent based models incorporating cultural conceptions of kapu (sacred) and noa (profane) in conjunction with environmental parameters and individual decision-making. The models explore how the ecodynamics of land use and post-depositional processes within this highly productive rain-fed agricultural system combined to pattern the distribution of archaeological features we observe in the present. We propose that the constriction and expansion of cultivation in response to variation in seasonal and annual rainfall produced a palimpsest landscape of periodically abandoned and reused residential features and temporary structures.

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): 15246