Abstract
Mining structures are among the most complex economic systems in prehistory. Until recently, research into prehistoric production processes has strongly focused on technological reconstruction. The complexity of production processes, their interconnectedness with the surrounding socioeconomic network and issues of quantification have, quite regrettably, been addressed to a much lesser extent. Simulation can contribute important insights into the latter problem areas, which is why we have been applying it to the prehistoric salt mines of Hallstatt (Upper Austria) during the past years. In this chapter, we report on these simulation efforts and show how a multi-level simulation approach can augment archaeological understanding during everyday research work.
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Acknowledgements
The excavations in Hallstatt have reached a scale at which research cannot be made in isolation; we are grateful for a large body of institutions and people supporting the work that is being conducted, among which we want to explicitly name the Natural History Museum Vienna (especially the Prehistoric Department), the Salinen Austria AG, the Vienna University of Technology (Department of Architectural Sciences, Department of Analysis and Scientific Computing), the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (Department of Material Sciences and Process Engineering) and the Vienna University (Institute of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology). From the on-site staff, we would especially like to thank Ralf Totschnig for conducting the experiments and Andreas W. Rausch for his documentation. Furthermore, we are grateful for the earlier work conducted by Fritz-Eckart Barth, which has paved the way for all of the current research activities that we undertake.
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Kowarik, K., Reschreiter, H., Wurzer, G. (2015). Mining with Agents: Modelling Prehistoric Mining and Prehistoric Economy. In: Wurzer, G., Kowarik, K., Reschreiter, H. (eds) Agent-based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00008-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00008-4_7
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