Population growth and collapse in a multiagent model of the Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley

A s the only social science that has access to data of sufficient duration to reveal long-term changes in patterned human behavior, archaeology traditionally has been concerned with describing and explaining how societies adapt and evolve in response to changing conditions. A major impediment to rigorous investigation in archaeology-the inability to conduct reproducible experiments-is one shared with certain other sciences, such as astronomy, geophysics, and paleontology. Computational modeling is providing a way around these difficulties. k Within anthropology and archaeology there has been a rapidly growing interest in so-called agent-based computational model

Abstract The Evolution of Social Behavior in the Prehistoric American Southwest

were prehistoric precursors of the modern Pueblo cultures of the Colorado Plateau. A rich paleoenvironmental record, based on alluvial geomorphology, palynology, and dendroclimatology, permits the accurate quantitative reconstruction of annual fluctuations in potential agricultural production (kg maize/hectare). The archaeological record of Anasazi farming groups from A.D. 200-1300 provides information on a millennium of sociocultural stasis, variability, change, and adaptation. We report on a multi-agent computational model of this society that closely reproduces main features of its actual history, including population ebb and flow, changing spatial settlement patterns, and eventual rapid decline. The agents in the model are monoagriculturalists, who decide both where to situate their fields and where to locate their settlements

The Evolution of Social Behavior in the Prehistoric American Southwest

These people were prehistoric precursors of the modern Pueblo cultures of the Colorado Plateau. A 100-percent archaeological survey of the valley, supplemented with limited excavations, has yielded a rich paleoenvironmental record, based on alluvial geomorphology, palynology, and dendroclimatology, permitting accurate quantitative reconstruction of annual fluctuations in potential agricultural production (kg maize/hectare). In particular, the archaeological record of Anasazi farming groups from A.D. 200-1300 provides information on a millennium of sociocultural stasis, variability, change, and adaptation. We report on a multi-agent computational model of this society that closely reproduces the main features of its actual history, including population ebb and flow, changing spatial settlement patterns, and eventual rapid decline. The agents in the model are monoagriculturalists, who decide both where to situate their fields as well as the location of their settlements. Nutritional needs constrain fertility. Agent heterogeneity is demonstrated to be crucial to the high fidelity of the model. A central question that anthropologists have asked for generations concerns how culture