Abstract
Some of the most significant settlements of late Iron Age Europe were founded in agriculturally marginal landscapes. The specific locations caused their food production potential to be regarded usually as deficit in terms of sustainability. Such notion, however, can be re-examined with help of new methodological tools. In order to capture the dynamics of the agro-pastoral economy processes in recurrent year-to-year cycles, this chapter exploits the objective advantages and limits of coupled GIS environmental and agent-based social modelling approaches. Three consecutive models are presented—the population dynamics in The Population Model, and the sustainability of the land-use strategies in The Crop Production Model and The Field Allocation Model. Models are firmly based on authentic archaeological and environmental record with the region around long-term investigated oppidum of Staré Hradisko (Czech Republic) used as the case study. Results obtained with the simulation demonstrate limits of the sustainable economy practiced by a constantly growing population under particular environmental settings. The immediate or gradual impact of the success rate in food production and its potential influences on the social processes including the oppida abandonment are also addressed.
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Notes
- 1.
Livestock-woodland models (currently under development) are not presented in this chapter.
- 2.
Opinions on how steep slopes are still cultivable quite differ. In the agricultural models it was believed that slopes beyond 7∘–10∘ were not tillable, though this applies especially for the machinery not the manual cultivation (cf. Fischer et al. 2010). These (indeed arbitrary) categories deliberately represent more benevolent option suited for hand tools ( < 15∘) and ploughing animals ( < 10∘).
- 3.
The categorization (with decreasing “suitability”) of the variables was the following: Aspect: slopes exposed to the cardinal points (from the South to the North); soil quality: Cambisols, Cambisols with Gley, Gleys and Pseudogleys, fluvial deposits in the floodplains; soil depth and rockiness: low, moderate, high (according to the BPEJ land evaluation); topographic wetness index: delimited the areas which were “too wet” (especially in the floodplains; more detailed categorization of this variable will be useful especially for the modeling of the pastures); topography: excluded slopes too steep ( > 15∘) or areas too rocky etc.
- 4.
For example in case a male adult agent requires 3,000 kcal daily, this means 1,095,000 kcal yearly, which equals 322.05 kg of cereals/year (if only cereals are consumed).
- 5.
This issue can be further examined for example also in relation to the feasting events when the surplus grain is consumed (cf. Van der Veen and Jones 2006).
- 6.
This model forms a part of the main group of Agricultural Models. Its trial runs are presented on the smaller site (four households)—the lowland open settlement of Ptení, where the landscape settings are similar to the oppidum of Staré Hradisko.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was made possible by the “Social modelling as a tool for understanding Celtic society and cultural changes at the end of the Iron Age” project, supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Grant No.P405/12/0926), and by the “Agent-based models and Social Simulation” project, supported by the Grant Agency of Excellence, University of Hradec Králové, Faculty of Informatics and Management. The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments that greatly contributed to improving the final version of the chapter.
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Danielisová, A., Olševičová, K., Cimler, R., Machálek, T. (2015). Understanding the Iron Age Economy: Sustainability of Agricultural Practices under Stable Population Growth. 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_9
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