Introduction
Reconstituting human past dynamics over a landscape or a territory is more than challenging:
• Modelling is a scientific methodology but also a de facto constructed agreement procedure among a group of scholars from different disciplines about the functioning of a society, an environment and their interactions.
It is thereby subject to points of view, assumptions and considerations which, in such a comparatively low data modelling context, are difficult to counter-argue;• It is nearly impossible to evaluate the importance of uncertainty and random events in the course of real history. One should acknowledge that any formalization of a historical reconstitution is actually the formalization of the average and most probable history within specific conditions, hypotheses and scenarios. Extraordinary environmental events, intra-society dynamics and breakouts are thereby impossible to reposition on their right time position. Nonetheless, a reconstruction of the complex system formed by man and his environment can help us to knit a web out of the loose ends of archaeological research.
This article describes several major modelling approaches with regard to past coupled human-environmental dynamics, with their specific strength, drawbacks
M. Saqalli (is)
CNRS, University of Toulouse 2 Jean Jaures, GEODE, 5 Allees a. Machado, 31058
Toulouse, France
e-mail: mehdi.saqalli@univ-tlse2.fr
T. Baum
University of Basel, IPNA, Vogelsangstrasse, 20, 72144 Dusslingen, Germany e-mail: Tilman.baum@unibas.ch
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J.A. Barcelo and F. Del Castillo (eds.), Simulating Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds, Computational Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_8 and difficulties, thereby illustrating the scale gap we would like to illustrate. Thus we elaborate the methodological and epistemological orientation we plea for.
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