SOWING SEEDS: INVESTIGATING EARLY HORTICULTURE IN NEW ZEALAND USING AGENT-BASED MODELLING
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-11-14

New Zealand was settled from tropical Polynesia around 700 BP. The colonisation involved the translocation of people, crops and animals across many thousands of kilometers of open-ocean. Once there, early colonists were confronted with strikingly different environmental conditions: New Zealand’s temperate climate was hostile to tropically adapted crops and the large latitudinal spread and varied topography created clear regional variation in habitat quality. The broadest pattern was the graded decline in horticultural habitats from the optimal north to the southern areas, which supported limited or no horticulture. This large environmental variability in a relatively small space presents interesting possibilities for the investigation of how farming societies go about establishing food production systems. However, in the absence of direct evidence of horticulture in New Zealand, the majority of discussion regarding the early economy has focused on human exploitation of the natural environment. In recent years agent-based modelling (ABM) has emerged as a useful tool for providing insight into archaeological questions where direct evidence is limited. Thus, in this paper we investigate the potential of ABM to develop productive models of the establishment phase of horticulture in New Zealand, which we believe can contribute to broader questions surrounding human settlement of new environments.

Author(s): Brown, Andrew (Bournemouth University) - Romanowska, Iza (Barcelona Supercomputing Centre)