The Oussa Pañn model is an agent-based representation of the social-ecological system embedded in the Oussa Pañn role-playing game. It represents shellfish harvesters making individual livelihood decisions between harvesting renewable shellfish resources from mudflats and engaging in alternative income-generating activities in a village. The model was developed to (i) compare simulated and observed game trajectories, (ii) verify the internal consistency of recorded game data, and (iii) provide a baseline against which observed player behaviour can be compared, notably through random decision-making scenarios.

This model builds on the Armature distribution within the PaleoscapeABM model, which is itself a variant of the PaleoscapeABM available here written by Wren and Janssen, and.

This model aims to explore where and how much shellfish is discarded at coastal and non-coastal locations by daily coastal foraging. We use this model’s output to test the idea that we can confidently use the archaeological record to evaluate the importance of shellfish in prehistoric people’s diets.

The recognition that aquatic adaptations likely had significant impacts on human evolution triggered an explosion of research on that topic. Recognizing coastal foraging in the past relies on the archaeological signature of that behavior. We use this model to explore why some coastal sites are very intensely occupied and see if it is due to the shellfish productivity of the coast.

This model employs optimal foraging theory principles to generate predictions of which coastal habitats are exploited in climatically stable versus variable environments, using the American Samoa as a study area.