Abstract
Following a strictly theory-building approach, we developed an agent-based simulation model, the Nice Musical Chairs model, to represent the competition between groups of stakeholders of farming and herding activities in the arid Afro-Eurasia. The model deepens the questions raised by the results of our former model, the Musical Chairs model, and further introduces three socio-economic mechanisms, which modulate the behavior and performance of stakeholders and their groups. First, we define land use pairing as the awarding, regarding productivity, of any direct cooperation between farming and herding within a group. Second, group management is modeled as the prerogative of a group leadership to manage stakeholders to pursue a particular proportion between farming and herding. Third, we introduce restricted access to pasture as the engagement in territorial control of rangelands in opposition to an open access regime. An exhaustive exploration of scenarios and parameters placed the control over rangelands as the most significant factor in the formation of land use patterns, followed by land use management. While the effect of land use pairing is mild in comparison, it is still a significant factor in group selection and thus in the persistence of particular land use patterns in the long run.
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02 September 2017
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Acknowledgements
Financial support for research in this paper was mainly provided by the project Simulpast “Simulating the Past to Understand Human Behaviour” (CSD2010-00034, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO program, funded by MICINN-Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation). The research was also supported by the R&D&I project CAMOTECCER (HAR2012-32653, funded by MINECO-Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness). A. Angourakis worked on this paper through the FPI contract (BES-2013-062691), M. Salpeteur through a contract funded directly by the SimulPast project, and V. Martínez through the post-doctoral contract Juan de la Cierva (JCI-2011-10963), all funded by MINECO. We are most grateful to J. I. Santos and M. Pereda (INSISOC, Universidad de Burgos) for their assistance in performing the LHS and random forest procedures. We are also grateful to M. Lake and M. Altaweel (University College of London) and to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
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An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9349-8.
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Angourakis, A., Salpeteur, M., Ferreras, V.M. et al. The Nice Musical Chairs Model: Exploring the Role of Competition and Cooperation Between Farming and Herding in the Formation of Land Use Patterns in Arid Afro-Eurasia. J Archaeol Method Theory 24, 1177–1202 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-016-9309-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-016-9309-8