From: derek gatherer (dgatherer2002@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Thu 12 Feb 2004 - 16:54:31 GMT
Artif Life. 2003 Fall;9(4):435-44.
The evolution of social behavior in the prehistoric
American Southwest.
Gumerman GJ, Swedlund AC, Dean JS, Epstein JM.
Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM
87501, USA.
Long House Valley, located in the Black Mesa area of
northeastern Arizona (USA), was inhabited by the
Kayenta Anasazi from circa 1800 B.C. to circa A.D.
1300. These people 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 to 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 and where to locate their settlements.
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