Agent-Based Models in Culture/Anthropology

Culture/Anthropology

Ecology

Biology and Medicine

Physics

Several of the earliest and most productive agent-based modeling projects are in archeology, anthropology, and culture.

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The Village Project

The Village Project, directed by Tim Kohler at Washington State University, is a pioneering application of ABMs to archeology. From the project web site: This project uses computer simulation in the form of agent-based modeling (ABM) to investigate where prehistoric people of the American Southwest would have situated their households based on both the natural and social environments in which they lived. The site includes readings and links to related information.

This project won the "2006 General Anthropology Division Award for Exemplary Cross Sub-Field Research" from the American Anthropological Association, for their paper: "Modeling Historical Ecology, Thinking about Contemporary Systems", C. David Johnson, Timothy A. Kohler, and Jason Cowan, American Anthropologist 107:96-107. The paper's abstract is:

One way to make archaeological trajectories compelling to contemporary audiences is through detailed computer simulation with graphical interfaces that allow students or researchers to explore historical sequences and ask "what if" questions of them. We discuss progress on modeling coupled human systems and ecosystems over long periods in the Mesa Verde region of the U.S. Southwest, a project developed with both research and educational products in mind. The project has many foci, but here we concentrate on fuel-wood availability and its pre-Hispanic use in the pygmy forests of this region. Our preliminary results tend to indicate that wood for fuels became sufficiently limited in this sequence to become a factor of considerable importance in decisions about where to live, how to build, and even whether to remain in the region. The same logic of modeling can be used to study problems of contemporary forest use in other parts of the world.

The Bali Model

Steve Lansing and colleagues study traditional water management in Bali, using ABMs as one tool.

MATER

Territorial Self-organization Models (Modelos de Auto-organização TERritorial), directed by Joaquim Ramos de Carvalho at the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra. The general aim of this project is to mix Computational Models, Geographic Information Systems and Historical and Archaeological evidence in order to understand how self-organizational processes shape human settlements throughout a territory, producing the so called Zipf distribution of the size of settlements.