Explicit Knowledge Representation in Archaeological ABMs
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-09-17

In current agent-based models (ABM) in archaeology individuals often do not interact directly. Instead, the environment acts as a mediator (Chliaoutakis and Chalkiadakis, 2016), similar to the price mechanism in neoclassical economics. In Schaff (2016) I analysed the consequences of such a representation and argued that an explicit knowledge representation would help to overcome these problems, because it allows to represent the distribution of individual knowledge and make it subject of the analysis, as argued for by von Hayek (1937). If we want to understand, e.g., settlement phenomena in archaeology, we suggest that each software agent embodies its own representation (i.e. model) of the geophysical reality, but also social and other relevant reality and in turn bases its decisions only upon this internal model. Because this internal representation is a construction based on the personal history of the agent, sameness becomes an affair of the internal agent‘s “mind”, as demanded by Georgescu-Roegen (1967, p. 37l). On the system level, we need to model agent communication and the general network of interaction to understand the propagation mechanisms for knowledge. The social network, as a consequence, cannot be fixed but must be emergent, too. In order to test the relevance of this idea for archaeological ABM we use the model of Janssen (2009, 2010), “Understanding Artificial Anasazi / Population Aggregation in Ancient Arid Environments” as a starting point. The model is exceptionally well documented (code published at openabm.org) and together with the original base-line model (Axtell et al., 2002), well-known between the community of archaeologists who work with ABM.

(Frederik Schaff)