A GAME OF… CHAIRS, MUSICAL CHAIRS  A THEORY BUILDING AGENT BASED APPROACH TO AGRO PASTORAL
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-11-13

We present the latest development of a seven-year effort in experimenting and generating theory that could help explain different land use patterns around water sources in arid environments. This work was developed within the case study 5, ‘oasis construction in Central Asia’, of the former SimulPast project. Using Agent-Based simulation models, we progressively put together mechanisms hypothesized to be relevant factors in shaping the balance of farming and herding land use within arid environments. The core mechanism is the intermittent competition between sedentary and mobile stakeholders, which we assume can happen during a part of the annual cycle (e.g., winter). Thus, the analogy with the children game, Musical Chairs. Through versioning models, we can observe the simulated consequences of each mechanism, and their interaction, under a wide variety of conditions.After a brief overview of the two previous models, Musical Chairs and Nice Musical Chairs, we will present the latest model, NomadFrontier. This latter model introduces the effects of (i) spatial relations, (ii) herding territorial marks, and (iii) a multi-level institutional structure, comprising corporate groups and political alliances between them. We review the main implications evidenced by the three models: (a) competition creates a bias favoring farming land use, (b) herding stakeholders tend to consolidate in smaller, more independent, political formations, and (c) the investment in territorial marks in the pastoral landscape is an important strategy for herding stakeholders. Last, we compare the simulation experiments with our assessment of several historical and archaeological case studies in Eurasia.


Author(s): Angourakis, Andreas - Fusaro, Agnese - Martínez, Verònica - Gurt, Josep M. (ERAAUB, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Barcelona)