Modelling Innovative Societies in Its Environment

8.4.1 TSM: “Terroir”-Based Society-Driven Models

The focus on technical and/or social aspects of changes at the local level has been studied as well. Meanwhile, tending to answer the combination of criteria (1) and (3) (social-environmental genericness on one hand, and innovations and differen­tiations on the other hand), such studies are de facto related to a KISS approach (Edmonds and Moss 2005) for this specific question:

• The first possibility are theoretical KISS models, through which a question on innovations and conflicts is analysed (Bentley et al.

• The second possibility, KIDS, is more focused on local situations on which many data and information are available and build some archaeological and/or socio-anthropological hypotheses to test, with the model as the test bed for various social and/or technical scenarios (Allen et al. 2006; Altaweel, 2008; Murphy 2012; Rogers et al. 2012).

One of the major developments on modelling past local “terroirs” concerns the Anasazi people in the Southwestern United States. The innovation there was to include social factors along with environmental ones for modelling a “terroir” (Kohler et al. 2005; Kohler 2008). However, the advantage of describing an “is­land” territory, i.e. a closed system where no influence from outside may be con­sidered, faced the default of this “island” situation: droughts did have such a huge impact that they overcame all social configurations. Such a modelling project may be more effective in study sites where environment is not a so blatant challenge.

Saqalli et al. (2014) describe another spatialized Agent-Based model, which aims was to reconstruct the LBK farming and society system functioning at the village level. The idea was to reconstruct in the same model the functioning along a very local grid level (1 ha/cell) of village societies, using assumptions from Bogaard (2002), Ebersbach (2003) and Schibler (2006).

Because the purpose of this model was to raise hypotheses on socio-anthropological and economic organisations and was dedicated to analyse its impact on the environment, it takes for granted biophysical aspects and tends to integrate and combine environmental rules from literature and available data through inference: The use of databases from the European Commission provides the access to present-day soil characteristics (pedology and elevation), from which was deduced the pedology of the LBK period, following the soil retro-evolution methodology assessed by Schwartz et al. (2011). Within this simulated environ­ment, family organisation and manpower availability are settled along with what archaeology and palaeo-analysis provides on the past farming system possibilities (for instance, family size can grow beyond mononuclear families, reconstituting thereby LBK houses and households, larger than Stargevo houses). Together with inferences from present-time agronomy and zootechny that both constrain the possible combinations of the farming system (for instance, the permanent fields), such a model may be used for testing hypotheses on the functioning of this past society. Similar models were built with the integration of demographic and social issues along environment, with environment and natural resources shortages and stresses as inputs and variable impacts on the population evolution and differenti­ation as outputs (Wilkinson et al. 2007; Verhagen and Whitley 2012).

The model is conditioned by food requirements and the demand in non-finite resources (firewood, timber, cultivable soils, livestock pasture or forests, hunting and gathering grounds) of individual households with household members varying from 1 to co (mean: 5 to 7) but is driven along time according to family social organization & individually randomized dynamics.

This model should be considered as a scenario testing platform. 12 variables were considered (for instance, initial population, site choice procedure, colonization pro­cedure, family organization, presence/absence of Mesolithic hunters-gatherers, inte­gration of climatic variations according to the European Pollen Database), with 2 to 3 possible “alleles”, inducing 108 864 combinations to explore. However, building such a model based on the inevitable assumption of a common complex of society rules faces the obvious critique from archaeologists that such an assumption cannot be applied on a so vast territory such as the LBK extent. More globally, one may question the gener­icness that formally comes from other sources and societies: Applying such hypotheses onto a past society implies considering them as generic and thereby applicable to broader spatial territories and cultures of the same period. Through this assumption, we raise the question whether the extension of any socio-ecosystem model from very local sites to global areas may be valid at all, i.e. is it possible to fulfil the criterion 1.

Another example of this model category with the name WELASSIMO is pre­sented in chapter 9 of this book.

8.4.2 WSM: “World” Size Society- Driven Models

Several attempts were made to extend the previous category of models to a global scale, with the necessity to answer the criterion (1): social & environmental spatial genericness.

Another model was tried to be assessed for answering the three criteria we raised) for both the everyday life, including social, family and agro-ecological constraints, at the local scale and the population spatial and demographic dynamics at the global scale: The Obresoc project (Bocquet-Appel et al. 2009) tries to reconstitute the expansion of the LBK culture throughout non-Mediterranean Europe, even beyond the regions where LBK archaeological remnants were found, in order to not artifi­cially constraint the settlement process. This was possible thanks to the assumption that what was collected from archaeology on spots related to the same culture is valid for all the sites of the same culture, thereby assuming the genericness criterion (1) without tending to prove it. The World Climate project (Hijmans et al. 2005) provide the access to present-day climate data (temperature and rainfall), from which was roughly reconstructed the climate and its variability at that time, as described in Saqalli (2015): The palynology-based climate reconstruction of Ortu et al. 2011 provides the average Europe temperature and rainfall time deviations with present-day figures, while the World Climate project provides the statistical devia­tions both in terms of time (seasonal variability based on 50 years of data) and space (with a precision of 10 km X 10 km cells, transposed and adapted to 1 ha-cell of the model). The work of Schwartz et al. (2011) was used for building the soil properties in the model, and Saqalli et al.

More globally, hypotheses on the rationality that may have driven past societies should integrate the everyday constraints at the household level because it is at this very level that environmental, social and agro-ecological constraints are experi­enced differently from one household to another. Using present-time human socio-anthropology and especially theories of conflicting and limited rationality and planning, restricted information and interaction may be very useful for building a simple but acceptable cognition of the households. Acknowledging that all societies are not homeostatic may allow emergent properties in modelled rural societies, including “surprises”, i.e. big expansion or total collapse without climate or other environmental constraints. For instance, the fact that family manpower should be actually seasonal and anthropologically restricted may have a huge impact on the productivity of such labour-constrained systems. Finally, the genericness point we raised may be partially reached through inference from “existing inferential frameworks (e.g., certain strands of evolutionary archaeology^[8]) but that explicitly sociological simulation remains a challenge” (Lake 2014).

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