Archaeological Implications and Predictions
Both the seeking walk, which is a simplified analogy for a forager that returns to a stone cache, and the random walk behavior both show that increased clustering of the raw material sources leads to increased time without raw materials in the tool kit.
However, time between procurement instances and time without materials in the tool kit have different implications. If a forager can stockpile a cache at a central location and can return to such a place then the forager can go extended periods without procuring because it could return to the cache to fill up on raw materials. On the other hand, these results suggest that if random walk takes the forager away from the central location and never or very seldom returns directly to a stone cache then random walk is an unrealistic or at least risky strategy because the probability that the foragers runs out of materials is high.A next step will be to project a map in an ABM of the Mossel Bay region that shows the location of archaeological sites in question, and that has potential raw materials sources and their real extent plotted on it. The forager will then be started at any one archaeological site and will move in a random walk to procure raw materials. Based on the results in this study one can predict several things: first, raw material richness should be low comparatively to the default neutral model as the actual number of unique raw materials on the landscape will be low. Second, as the agent is moving about the landscape the time spent without any raw materials in the tool kit will be high, in the order of days and weeks. This suggests that alternative procurement strategies need to be evaluated that meets the demands of the stone tool economy.
Acknowledgments The majority of this research was funded by the National Science Foundation (USA; grants # BCS-1138073, BCS-9912465, BCS-0130713, and BCS-0524087 to Curtis Mar- ean), the Hyde Family Foundation, the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, NORAM, and the Andrew E. and G. Norman Wigeland Fund.