Displaying 2 of 2 results herding clear search
I am a computational archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, where I direct the Computational Archaeology Laboratory. My research integrates geospatial analysis, agent-based and simulation modeling, and complex adaptive systems theory to investigate long-term human–environment interactions, with particular attention to socio-environmental change associated with early farming and herding in Mediterranean and other semi-arid landscapes. I have conducted field and modeling research in regions including Italy, Jordan, and Central Asia, and my work spans landscape archaeology, land-use dynamics, and environmental modeling. I have been a member of the CoMSES community for well over a decade and have contributed multiple models to the Computational Model Library, several of which have undergone formal peer review. In addition to research, I regularly teach with agent-based models at undergraduate and graduate levels and use CoMSES models as both research and pedagogical resources. I am committed to open, reproducible, and theoretically informed computational modeling and to strengthening the role of peer-reviewed models as durable scholarly contributions.
Computational Archaeology, Food Production, Forager-Farmer transition, Neolithic, Agro-pastoralism, Erosion Modeling, Anthropogenic Landscapes, Geoarchaeology, Modeling and Simulation, GIS, Imagery Analysis, ABM, Mediterranean
I am a computational archaeologist with a strong background in humanities and social sciences, specialising in simulating socioecological systems from the past.
My main concern has been to tackle meaningful theoretical questions about human behaviour and social institutions and their role in the biosphere, as documented by history and archaeology. My research focuses specifically on how social behaviour reflects long-term historical processes, especially those concerning food systems in past small-scale societies. Among the aspects investigated are competition for land use between sedentary farmers and mobile herders (Angourakis et al. 2014; 2017), cooperation for food storage (Angourakis et al. 2015), origins of agriculture and domestication of plants (Angourakis et al. 2022), the sustainability of subsistence strategies and resilience to climate change (Angourakis et al. 2020, 2022). He has also been actively involved in advancing data science applications in archaeology, such as multivariate statistics on archaeometric data (Angourakis et al. 2018) and the use of computer vision and machine learning to photographs of human remains (Graham et al. 2020).
As a side, but not less important interest, I had the opportunity to learn about video game development and engage with professionals in Creative Industries. In one collaborative initiative, I was able to combine my know-how in both video games and simulation models (\href{https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92843-8_15}{Szczepanska et al. 2022}).