Artificial Anasazi is an agent-based model of farming households in the Long House Valley, Arizona, from 800 to 1350 CE. Each household chooses where to farm and settle based on expected harvest, water sources and stored maize, and simulated household counts are compared with the archaeological record.

This release adapts the NetLogo Models Library version (Stonedahl & Wilensky 2010) of Janssen’s (2009) NetLogo replication of the original Ascape model (Dean et al. 2000; Axtell et al. 2002). It contains four configurations in one NetLogo 7.0.4 file, selected with two switches:

• Both switches off: the baseline, which is the Models Library model with small fixes that make it work as intended (the arable-uplands zone name, the setup base yield, the initial household count, one-tick-lag capacity reporting, and seed control with observation-only instruments).
• soil-on?: dynamic soil quality that depletes under cultivation and regrows, following Janssen (2010, eq. 4).
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Resilience of humans in the Upper Paleolithic could provide insights in how to defend against today’s environmental threats. Approximately 13,000 years ago, the Laacher See volcano located in present-day western Germany erupted cataclysmically. Archaeological evidence suggests that this is eruption – potentially against the background of a prolonged cold spell – led to considerable culture change, especially at some distance from the eruption (Riede, 2017). Spatially differentiated and ecologically mediated effects on contemporary social networks as well as social transmission effects mediated by demographic changes in the eruption’s wake have been proposed as factors that together may have led to, in particular, the loss of complex technologies such as the bow-and-arrow (Riede, 2014; Riede, 2009).

This model looks at the impact of the interaction between climate change trajectory and an extreme event, such as the Laacher See eruption, on the generational development of hunter-gatherer bands. Historic data is used to model the distribution and population dynamics of hunter-gatherer bands during these circumstances.

This model is an extended version of the original MERCURY model (https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/ ) . It allows for experiments to be performed in which empirically informed population sizes of sites are included, that allow for the scaling of the number of tableware traders with the population of settlements, and for hypothesised production centres of four tablewares to be used in experiments.

Experiments performed with this population extension and substantive interpretations derived from them are published in:

Hanson, J.W. & T. Brughmans. In press. Settlement scale and economic networks in the Roman Empire, in T. Brughmans & A.I. Wilson (ed.) Simulating Roman Economies. Theories, Methods and Computational Models. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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