Incorporating Knowledge about Future Weather Conditions on Navigational Decisions in an Agent-Based Seafaring Simulation: Comparison to Simpler Navigation Strategies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The efficiency and safety of ocean travel is greatly dependent on along-trip environmental conditions. Agent-based simulations that optimize routes based on expected environmental conditions have been used by the shipping industry and the sailboat racing community for decades. Some recent efforts in archaeology have used the latter models. Here I describe what I believe is first agent-based seafaring model capable of route optimization designed specifically for archaeology, and with the distinguishing feature of defining how far into the future conditions are known by the vessel’s occupants. Simulations of the same trips with optimizing and non-optimizing versions of the model are conducted to provide insight into how and by how much knowledge about future weather influences trips performed under distinct settings (length of trip, oceanographic conditions, season, etc…). Under the widely accepted understanding that ancient seafarers possessed considerable knowledge about the ocean environment, including the ability to forecast future conditions, I argue that the new version of the model allows for the adoption of more realistic navigational strategies in seafaring simulations. The experiments comparing optimized to non-optimized simulated trips will show under which settings knowledge of future conditions have the most and least impact on trip outcome.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39358.0