In the last half of the 1200s, all of the remaining Anasazi farmers were concentrated in five community clusters, one centered on Long House Pueblo. By A.D. 1300, the Anasazi were gone, abandoning not only Long House Valley, but the entire northern half of the Colorado Plateau. These are the kinds of questions that Gumerman and his colleagues hope to address in the Long House Valley simulation. With the addition of stochastic environmental events such as flash floods and crop-killing frosts, the model will be ready to run. These are the kinds of questions that generate a great deal of excitement at the Santa Fe Institute among George and his colleagues, and computer simulations may be the quickest way to arrive at testable answers.
Simulations allow the historical scientist the incredible luxury of replaying the tape of history.
As the tape is replayed in digital time, questions are refined, hypotheses are reformulated, and we move closer to an understanding of long-term cultural change and the evolution of complex adaptive systems. John Ware is an archaeologist at the Museum of New Mexico. As an undergraduate at Prescott College, Ware was one of Gumerman's first students more than two decades ago. Since then the two have collaborated on many research projects.