Explaining the Adoption of "Innovations" in Western Europe during Bronze Age: Towards an Agent-Based Simulation.

BARCELÓ, JOAN ANTON; CAPUZZO, GIACOMO; DEL CASTILLO, FLORENCIA; MORELL, BERTA; NEGRE, JOAN

CAA 2014, 21st century Archaeology

ArchaeoPress

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2015; p. 623 - 630

In this contribution we present the design phase of an ABM implemented to understand how cultural identities and cultural standardization may have emerged in a prehistoric sedentary early complex society. The aim of the model is to explain how diversity and self-identification may have emerged in the small-scale societies of our prehistoric past. The model explores some possible consequences of the theoretical assumptions about cultural diversity and the process of ethnogenesis. We have not modelled the decision process from the point of view of individuals, but at the level of the population, modelling social dynamics as a set of factors that constrain social actions. The agent does not decide as a rational individual, but probabilities for action at each cycle are taken into account as soon as local conditions change. It is a way for analysing the consequences of actions without regarding the cognitive causes of action.