Authors

Dries Daems

Department of Arts, Culture, History and Antiquity – VU Amsterdam

Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project – KU Leuven

Abstract

People inherently need to interact with their environment for a range of activities, including collecting foodstuffs, hunting animals, working the land, and exploiting resources. All human societies need energy and resources in order to sustain themselves. As a result, people have a profound impact on their environment when performing these activities and exploiting these resources. All of the goals and practices of a society to track and collect resources can be subsumed under the moniker of resource exploitation strategies. For societies to be resilient over longer periods of time, these strategies need to be sustainable. That is, a balanced interaction between society and nature is needed in which the social consumption of resources does not exceed their availability and/or regeneration rate (Walker, Salt, and Reid 2006).

In this paper, we will use agent-based modelling to explore the underlying mechanisms of human impact on the environment by simulating subsistence and resource exploitation strategies in southwest Anatolia from Iron Age to Hellenistic times (1000-100 BCE) (Boogers and Daems 2022). Using realistic GIS data (wood standing stock, agricultural yields and clay stocks) and empirical settlement patterns as input data, we simulate communities with resource exploitation strategies for three main resources: food, wood and clay. Results of our SagaScape model have been used to test the hypothesis that the hilltop sites in the inland of southwest Anatolia can be considered major drivers of environmental change during the Iron Age to Hellenistic period (Daems and Boogers 2023; Daems et al. 2021; Boogers and Daems 2022). These results indicate that our simulations are consistent with empirical observations of anthropogenic zones of human impact embedded in a natural forest matrix. While general patterns of sustainability can be observed for most communities under most model settings, a broader parameter swoop suggests that in times of high stress or resource demand, trade-offs emerge between the various resource exploitation strategies (Hegmon 2017). This results in the disruption of resource stocks in certain communities, suggesting several scenarios of scarcity, struggle and even site abandonment. Our model thus provides a suitable baseline for the assessment of socio-ecological sustainability in subsistence and resource exploitation of local communities.

Barring a few notable examples (e.g. the so-called Anasazi model, see: Dean et al. 2000; Axtell et al. 2002; Janssen 2009), the application of agent-based modelling in archaeology all too often remains limited to single iterations. Thus, they operate mainly on the level of ‘toy models’. In this paper, we will present the first outlines of a new set of iterations of our SagaScape model to assess the impact of urbanism and urban transformation during the middle and late Hellenistic period (200-25 BCE) on the sustainability of human-environment interactions and resource exploitation strategies. We will use these new results to offer a broader reflection on the usage of computational modelling as a useful tool in archaeology to reconstruct and understand dynamic diachronic human-environment interactions.

References

Axtell, Robert L., Joshua M. Epstein, Jeffrey S. Dean, George J. Gumerman, Alan C. Swedlund, Jason Harburger, Shubha Chakravarty, Ross Hammond, Jon Parker, and Miles Parker. 2002. ‘Population Growth and Collapse in a Multiagent Model of the Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (suppl 3): 7275–79. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.092080799.

Boogers, Stef, and Dries Daems. 2022. ‘SAGAscape: Simulating Resource Exploitation Strategies in Iron Age to Hellenistic Communities in Southwest Anatolia’. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 5 (1): 169–87. https://doi.org/10.5334/jcaa.90.

Daems, Dries, and Stef Boogers. 2023. ‘The Power of Emergence: The Effects of Bottom-Up Decision-Making in Resource Exploitation Strategies on Community Sustainability in Iron Age to Hellenistic Anatolia’. In Modelling Human-Environment Interactions in and beyond Prehistoric Europe, edited by Samuel Seuru and Benjamin Albouy, 133–42. Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34336-0_9.

Daems, Dries, Ralf Vandam, Sam Cleymans, Nils Broothaerts, Stef Boogers, Hideko Matsuo, and Adnan Mirhanoğlu. 2021. ‘The Social Metabolism of Past Societies: A New Approach to Environmental Changes and Societal Responses in the Territory of Sagalassos (SW Turkey)’. In Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East: Diversity in Collapse and Resilience, edited by Paul Erdkamp, Joseph G. Manning, and Koenraad Verboven, 587–614. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81103-7_20. 

Dean, Jeffrey S., George J. Gumerman, Joshua M. Epstein, Robert L. Axtell, Alan C. Swedlund, Miles T. Parker, and Steven McCarroll. 2000. ‘Understanding Anasazi Culture Change Through Agent-Based Modeling’. In Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies, edited by Timothy A. Kohler and George J. Gummerman, 179–205. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press, Inc. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=344758.344768.

Hegmon, Michelle, ed. 2017. The Give and Take of Sustainability: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Tradeoffs. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Janssen, Marco A. 2009. ‘Understanding Artificial Anasazi’. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 12 (4): 1–13. https://www.jasss.org/12/4/13.html.

Walker, Brian Walker, David Salt, and Walter Reid. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (version None edition). None edition. Washington, DC: Island Press.