Introduction: Archaeological inferences and computational spaces

This chapter analyzes the palimpsest of archaeological data scattered across the landscapes of eastern Spain. It explores the computational model in Net-Logo a platform for the creation of agent-based models (ABM) to test whether land-use dynamics in which small-holders exhausted the fields around a farmstead and moved to another could produce a cumulative archaeological landscape of regularly spaced sites. The chapter characterizes the spread of a particular hunting technology across Pleistocene Europe in the millennia leading up to the last glacial maximum (LGM). It creates a computational model that combined spreading rates derived from a spatial analysis of the radiocarbon data with information about the rates at which humans on foot likely traversed terrain of varying ruggedness. Computational model is a potentially transformative technology for the social sciences in general and archaeology in particular. Results generated by the MedLand Modeling Laboratory (MML) can be treated as hypotheses about human-environmental interaction