CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Inside a computer a virtual model of the historical past can run infinite times. Simulated scenarios allow exploring (by altering the variables) the entire possible range of outcomes for different past behaviors. The purpose is to obtain useful insights in terms of potentialities, dispositions or causal powers to construct a model to explain the long term social dynamics. Therefore, the starting point of the explanation of social systems by means of computer simulation is not the simulation of one particular system but the investigation of the mathematically possible development of specific classes of model systems (pure systems). Besides, current simulations generate a huge quantity of information which is not suitable to be handled in current desktop computers and spreadsheet like software. Different approaches along with other software tools are necessary in order achieve the milestone of extracting information and knowledge from this ?ocean of data?. Therefore, several steps have to be done in order to make the software tools capable to manage and extract relevant data and to work statistically with them.We present an experimentally simulated model of hunter-gatherer past, in which manipulations are allowed for agent-level parameters to test the global implications of behavioral assumptions in the case of small-scale societies, but also it is allowed to manipulate global parameters to test a macro theory about the dynamical implications of social behavior assumptions in the case of more complex societies. The purpose of our simulation is to understand the possibilities of prehistoric behavior in terms of a priori affordances. For those reasons, the output is an enormous quantity of information to be managed in order to do statistical research.