Session: #554

Discussion session (with formal abstracts)

Archaeology has a long tradition of fostering formal theory and research on human-environmental interactions, from Optimal Foraging Theory and agricultural land use models, to the environmental impact of urban centres or the impact of natural catastrophes. Currently, we see a call for closer integration of archaeological insights with societal challenges such as climate change, globalisation or social tensions. This requires robust and mature scientific practices that examine past communities and their interaction with the environment in a systematic, formal, testable, and reproducible way. Simulation modelling, loosely defined as any computational method applied to simulate socio-ecological dynamics, has been proposed as the most promising avenue since it
- produces formalized, quantitative what-if scenarios that can be analyzed across spatio-temporal scales,
- integrates evidence from different sources (archaeology, palaeoclimatology, archaeological science, etc.) to uncover the interplay of the factors involved in human-environmental interactions and
- uncovers underlying processes and mechanisms making the findings generalisable.

This session focuses on the integration of simulation modelling and empirical approaches to human-environmental interactions, in order to create new evidence-based narratives of the human past. How can we exploit the archaeological record more effectively to set up and validate simulation models, and how can we use these models to guide future research questions and data collection? 'Big data' analysis now brings unprecedented potential for combining datasets from widely diverging sources, including uncertainties and biases. These efforts are mostly undertaken separately from simulation modelling, often limiting the results of 'big data' analyses to pattern description. Also, modelling projects often struggle to find appropriate validation datasets, and do not communicate with large-scale data analysis projects.

We invite papers trying to bridge this divide, discussing practical and theoretical aspects of this problem over a range of case studies including agent-based simulations, mathematical, spatial and statistical models, and formal ontologies.

human-environmental interactions, simulation modelling, 'Big data' analysis

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This session is organized by members of the Network for Agent-based modelling of Socio-ecological systems in Archaeology (NASSA) consortium (https://archaeology-abm.github.io/NASSA-hub/), whose aim is to gather an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers to compile agent-based modelling modules and organise them as an open modelling library.

Philip Verhagen (Netherlands) ¹

Iza Romanowska (Denmark) ²