Modeling Polity Growth Among Ancestral Pueblo People in the Northern San Juan

Summary

In this paper we present research on the development of village-spanning polities in the central Mesa Verde region. First, we explore the dynamics of modeling not only households, but also groups of households, and how the interaction between them influences the development of social strategies. Second, we examine how territoriality shapes group development; we allow our agents to track lineage, and for lineages to own land, which, when populations increase, creates conflicts over the most productive lands. We apply models for the development of conflict and warfare on top of the "Village" agent-based model to examine how territoriality and conflict interact, allowing matrilineal groups to subsume competing groups in a chain of dominance and subordinance to create large village-spanning polities. Finally, we demonstrate the dynamics of polity formation in the central Mesa Verde by showing the construction and dissolution of polities through time, comparing new data compiled from the archaeological record with output from our simulation.

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): 15551