Thursday, February 12, 2015

Village Model

http://village.anth.wsu.edu/node/67
What now seems like a very long long time ago, when I was getting up to speed with Agent-based modeling and GIS, I came across a great edited book entitled "Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes". 

One chapter in particular that I really enjoyed because of its clarity and use of data was by Kohler et al. (2000) entitled "Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settlement Determinants and Spatial Efficiency Among Late Ancestral Pueblo Populations of the Mesa Verde Region, U.S. Southwest". 

The chapter explored the question of why did Pueblo people vary their living arrangements between  compact villages and dispersed hamlets between 901-1287AD? To this day, I use this chapter when I am teaching about early agent-based models. While the initial model was implemented in Swarm, it has now been ported to Repast and developed further by an NSF supported program called Village Ecodynamics Project.




Full Reference:
Kohler, T.A., Kresl, J., Van Wes, Q., Carr, E. and Wilshusen, R.H. (2000), 'Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settlement Determinants and Spatial Efficiency Among Late Ancestral Pueblo Populations of the Mesa Verde Region, U.S. Southwest', in Kohler, T.A. and Gumerman, G.J. (eds.), Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 145-178.

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