Virtual Archeology

[_rck_]

The latest Scientific American had an article on virtual archaeology, more precisely, on the used of agent-based simulations to formulate theories about settlement patterns. The basic idea of the article is to get a detailed map of an area (say, some valley in Middle America) that contains both environmental as well as archaeological information

Comments

[middle_savagery]

Pretty neat stuff. Though some of it sounds like it's based on a positivistic settlement pattern/ecological determinism that have been heavily critiqued in archaeology since the mid-80s. There's some crazy demography stuff going on right now--I just saw a finalized NSF proposal with elaborate equations about survivability on islands in the Pacific.

[middle_savagery]

Have should be has. Tim Ingold gave a talk last night and the department paid for more booze than I should have had.

wow!

[_rck_]

This is almost as bad as that Russian statistician who thinks that Jesus and Charlemagne where the same person because according to his statistical equations their scores are so similar!

At any rate, in general I find the sort of approach that uses energy output of a civilization and similar metrics extremely interesting and refreshing; as Marx would have said, mankind has to eat & drink & have fuel and doesn't exist in the heavens of abstract thought. Like Jamie-Drake's work on the rate of pottery shards for the area around Jerusalem around 1000bc, which suggests that the Davidic Empire cannot have been as large as the Bible makes it out.

But I would be very interested in getting a couple of key references to criticism of of positivistic settlement patterns.