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Modelling Plant Cultivation in Prehistory
Modelling Plant Cultivation in Prehistory (CULM) is an innovative, transdisciplinary project that aims at proposing new interpretative frameworks for the Origin of Agriculture (OA) through novel theoretical approaches and the application of groundbreaking techniques. Particularly, it centers on the social changes that took place during the transitions from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, one of the most important events in human history. Because of the methodological approach proposed, CULM can be placed at the forefront of the reasearch in the field of Digital Humanities.
Plant domestication, and the subsequent existence of societies based exclusively on domesticates, is the result of a long-term process that began most probably with the intensification of foraging practices and the beginning of plant management. Increasingly, research is showing that far from being a linear and homogeneous process, this transition was complex and heterogeneous. Indeed, the ever escalating recognition of the importance of mixed subsistence strategies (the contemporaneous utilization of both wild and domestic resources), proves that past societies were able to adopt a wide array of strategies for the management of natural resources and environments. This prompted to the now prevailing hypothesis that this process underwent reversion crisis, including in its final stages, as demonstrated by recent archaeological research.
One of the aspects that has received little attention concerns the social changes, and specifically the modifications of labour practices, that took place in this period. Indeed, it can be suggested that during this transition both the total investment, as well as the rhythms and cycles of labour related to plant management, underwent important modifications. Amongst other effects, the intensification of agricultural labour might produce an increase in productivity but also an improvement in the management of risk related to resource exploitation. In other words, it represents a different form of interacting with the natural environment, through collective labour, that gains importance in the continuum between foraging and farming. What were the determining factors for the survival or failure of the experimentations with plant management? This question is the object of speculative interpretation at best, due to the fact that we do not have data with which to empirically test the relative hypotheses.
Through the use of formal computational modeling and social simulation, CULM explores the changes between foraging and farming economies with the aim of building new theories on why domestication processes succeeded or failed. It will do so by formally simulating different scenarios of gathering, low-level food production and agriculture of annual plants, tree products and underground storage organs. The scenarios will allow the analysis of what specific conditions accounts for the emergence of a surplus, understood both as oversupply of resources, but also as excess of time for parts of the population. These measures will dictate its survival or failure and will be taken as proxies of the sustainability of a specific strategies.
Modelling Plant Cultivation in Prehistory (CULM) is an innovative, transdisciplinary project that aims at proposing new interpretative frameworks for the Origin of Agriculture (OA) through novel theoretical approaches and the application of groundbreaking techniques. Particularly, it centers on the social changes that took place during the transitions from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, one of the most important events in human history. Because of the methodological approach proposed, CULM can be placed at the forefront of the reasearch in the field of Digital Humanities.
Plant domestication, and the subsequent existence of societies based exclusively on domesticates, is the result of a long-term process that began most probably with the intensification of foraging practices and the beginning of plant management. Increasingly, research is showing that far from being a linear and homogeneous process, this transition was complex and heterogeneous. Indeed, the ever escalating recognition of the importance of mixed subsistence strategies (the contemporaneous utilization of both wild and domestic resources), proves that past societies were able to adopt a wide array of strategies for the management of natural resources and environments. This prompted to the now prevailing hypothesis that this process underwent reversion crisis, including in its final stages, as demonstrated by recent archaeological research.
One of the aspects that has received little attention concerns the social changes, and specifically the modifications of labour practices, that took place in this period. Indeed, it can be suggested that during this transition both the total investment, as well as the rhythms and cycles of labour related to plant management, underwent important modifications. Amongst other effects, the intensification of agricultural labour might produce an increase in productivity but also an improvement in the management of risk related to resource exploitation. In other words, it represents a different form of interacting with the natural environment, through collective labour, that gains importance in the continuum between foraging and farming. What were the determining factors for the survival or failure of the experimentations with plant management? This question is the object of speculative interpretation at best, due to the fact that we do not have data with which to empirically test the relative hypotheses.
Through the use of formal computational modeling and social simulation, CULM explores the changes between foraging and farming economies with the aim of building new theories on why domestication processes succeeded or failed. It will do so by formally simulating different scenarios of gathering, low-level food production and agriculture of annual plants, tree products and underground storage organs. The scenarios will allow the analysis of what specific conditions accounts for the emergence of a surplus, understood both as oversupply of resources, but also as excess of time for parts of the population. These measures will dictate its survival or failure and will be taken as proxies of the sustainability of a specific strategies.
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SimulPast - Simulating the Past to understand Human Behaviour |