Abstract
Computational modeling of pastoralist societies that range as nomads over diverse environmental zones poses interesting challenges beyond those posed by sedentary societies. We present HouseholdsWorld, a new agent-based model of agro-pastoralists in a natural habitat that includes deserts, grasslands, and mountains. This is the paper-of-record for the HouseholdsWorld model as part of a broader interdisciplinary project on computational modeling of long-term human adaptations in Inner Asia. The model is used for conducting experiments on socio-environmental interactions, social dynamics experiments, and for developing additional models with higher levels of social complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
The influence of pastoral nomadic societies from the steppes of Eurasia on world history antedates the Xiong-nu period and the opening of the Silk Roads, as far back as 1000 BCE and the Scythians: “The Scythians and the related Sarmatians are the first steppe nomads of whom we have any real knowledge, although the Romans had long contact with the Parthians, another related people who came off the steppe to found an empire in what had been Persian territory” ([13]: 33). See also [12] and [4] for general histories of this formative period in the rise of Asian steppe pastoral nomad societies.
- 2.
We are grateful to W. Honeychurch, W. Fitzhugh, B. Frohlich, and D. Tseveendorj for their expert advice on formulating these rules, based on the anthropological archaeological record of early Inner Asia and the ethnography reported for modern Mongolia.
- 3.
In the target system, the clan or tribal membership of households is far more consequential. For example, such associations can regulate patterns of conflict by segmentary or complementary opposition, a social feature we investigate in a different albeit related model in this project [10]. In the HouseholdWold model the clan or tribal membership of households only affects their camping behavior.
- 4.
In the target system the range of camp size is 5–8 households, with larger or smaller camps increasingly infrequent (improbable).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the second World Congress on Social Simulation, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA, 14–17 July, 2008. Funding for this study was provided by grant no. BCS–0527471 from the US National Science Foundation, Human and Social Dynamics Program, and by the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University. The authors thank all members of the Mason-Smithsonian Joint Project on Inner Asia, especially Bill Honeychurch, Sean Luke, Bruno Frohlich, Bill Fitzhugh, Max Tsvetovat, and Dawn Parker, as well as three anonymous referees, and D. Tseveendorj of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Archaeology, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for comments and discussions.
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Cioffi-Revilla, C., Rogers, J.D., Latek, M. (2010). The MASON HouseholdsWorld Model of Pastoral Nomad Societies. In: Takadama, K., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Deffuant, G. (eds) Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena. Agent-Based Social Systems, vol 7. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99781-8_14
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