Une troisième voie pour l’archéologie

Explaining site locations and sizes are examples of the many tasks that require a dynamic approach to the archaeological record —one that takes into account shifting resource distributions, human impact on the landscape, and the locations of other competing and cooperating groups. I discuss how the Village Ecodynamics Project, a group of researchers from several disciplines, is approaching these problems in portions of the US Southwest occupied by Pueblo farming groups between A.D. 600 and 1500. Agent-based models operating on semi-realistic landscapes allow us to estimate where households should be located, and in what numbers, if they were following the rules that we set forth in computer code.We have been studying the responses of virtual households to rules specifying that they locate themselves so as to approximately optimize their access to potential maize production opportunities, hunting opportunities for deer, hare, and rabbit, water, and wood for fuel. We can then compare the simulated locations with those known from the archaeological record, and this comparison in turn helps us to decode the processes that prehistoric households were in fact using to form the settlement patterns that we see in the record.So far we have applied these models to estimate carrying capacities and helping us to determine when, and to what extent, the real households were optimizing their locations, in addition to other uses which space precludes discussing here. Although we have, to date, been most interested in studying questions of habitat use, we are now beginning to apply these tools to studying social evolutionary processes. I argue that these approaches are different enough from either an archaeology that begins from data, or one that is primarily theoretical, that we ought to think of them as constituting a third approach to the study of prehistory