Of Animal Husbandry and Food Production—A First Step towards a Modular Agent-Based Modelling Platform for Socio-Ecological Dynamics

Agent-based models provide detailed, bottom-up approaches to investigate complex socio-ecological systems. This study presents a first step towards a modular agent-based simulation that is based upon empirical data, as well as environmental suitability maps and an assessment of livestock units. To illustrate the capabilities of our simulation, we use a geographically explicit approach to simulate a component of the production of animal products of a rural settlement in the lower Bakırçay catchment, western Turkey. The model structurally couples various agent types representing several elements and processes of the animal husbandry and food production value chain, such as sedentary herders—practising daily, short-distance pastoralism—and their flocks of goats and sheep, as well as milking and slaughtering. The modelling tool captures the fundamental socio-ecological dynamics of animal husbandry and food production in rural settlements. Therefore, the tool is valuable as a basis to discuss hypotheses regarding the number of animals that are needed to cover the requirements of different growing populations

Of Animal Husbandry and Food Production - A First Step towards a Modular Agent-Based Modelling Platform for Socio-Ecological Dynamics

Agent-based models provide detailed, bottom-up approaches to investigate complex socio-ecological systems. This study presents a first step towards a modular agent-based simulation that is based upon empirical data, as well as environmental suitability maps and an assessment of livestock units. To illustrate the capabilities of our simulation, we use a geographically explicit approach to simulate a component of the production of animal products of a rural settlement in the lower Bakırçay catchment, western Turkey. The model structurally couples various agent types representing several elements and processes of the animal husbandry and food production value chain, such as sedentary herders—practising daily, short-distance pastoralism - and their flocks of goats and sheep, as well as milking and slaughtering. The modelling tool captures the fundamental socio-ecological dynamics of animal husbandry and food production in rural settlements. Therefore, the tool is valuable as a basis to discuss hypotheses regarding the number of animals that are needed to cover the requirements of different growing populations

Modeling Late Prehistoric and Early Historic Pastoral Adaptations in Northern Mongolia's Darkhad Depression

This dissertation investigates pastoral adaptations, multi-resource economic strategies and monument construction and use diachronically in the Darkhad Depression of northern Mongolia. This program of research has utilized GIS analysis, predictive modeling, pedestrian survey, targeted excavation, experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. The results of this research contribute to a more detailed understanding of how this region contributed to broader social, political and economic change in the Bronze and Iron Ages through the Xiongnu period (ca. 2500 BCE – 200 CE). Numerous models have been proposed to explain the transition from an agricultural economy to an agro-pastoral or fully nomadic economy. However, there are far fewer explanatory models for the incorporation or adoption of pastoralism into existing hunting, gathering and/or fishing economies. Furthermore, a hyper-focus on connections between China and Inner Asia has dominated discussions of inter-regional, inter-economic relationships. Such trends have overshadowed potentially earlier important relationships with groups to the north, including the hunter-gatherers of Lake Baikal, and early pastoralists of the Minusinsk Basin and Tuva (Russian Federation). This dissertation research, in contrast, has employed a holistic landscape approach that examined both ritual and domestic activity areas in order to model the introduction and integration of herding practices with existing hunting-gathering-fishing economies. Recent archaeological research in the Darkhad Depression of north-central Mongolia has investigated the ritual landscape and has concluded that the monuments in this region, while not particularly large, are the oldest of their kind known in Mongolia and neighboring regions of Kazakhstan and Russia. If these monuments are connected with new forms of a pastoral economy and hierarchical social organization, as some have suggested, this underscores the importance of this region for modeling early pastoralist orientations in Mongolia and perhaps more broadly within northeastern Asia. This dissertation examines these important late prehistoric developments and situates this work in the context of other recent and important archaeology projects within Mongolia. The results of this research contribute to a growing trend in the scholarship of early multi-resource pastoralists that highlights the varied ways in which domestic animals were incorporated into existing economies, impacting local and supra-local social, political and ritual practices and lifeways

The MASON HouseholdsWorld Model of Pastoral Nomad Societies

Abstract. Computational modeling of pastoralist societies that range as nomads over diverse environmental zones poses interesting challenges beyond those posed by sedentary societies. We present HouseholdsWorld, a new agentbased model of agro-pastoralists in a natural habitat that includes deserts, grasslands, and mountains. This is the paper-of-record for the HouseholdsWorld model as part of a broader interdisciplinary project on computational modeling of long-term human adaptations in Inner Asia. The model is used for conducting experiments on socio-environmental interactions, social dynamics experiments, and for developing additional models with higher levels of social complexity