Seminar 4th May 2011 1 p.m. University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Building 65A, Sara Champion Room
Spatial and Temporal Models of Jomon Settlement
Enrico Crema
University College London
- Web page
- http://www.cecd.ucl.ac.uk/people/?go1=91
- Categories
- Archaeology, Complex Systems, Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution
- Submitter
- Petrina Butler
ACRG at University of Southampton
ACRG: Archaeological Computing Research Group
Seminar with Enrico Crema (UCL)
Sara Champion Room, Building 65A (Avenue Campus) at 1pm
"SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MODELS OF JOMON SETTLEMENT"
Abstract
This paper will present an ongoing doctoral project which aims to investigate the variation of hunter-gatherer settlements systems between the Early and Late Jomon period (7000-3220 cal BP) in central Japan.
Jomon hunter-gatherers has been regarded as "the best researched complex hunter-gatherer tradition known to archaeology" (Rowley-Conwy 2001) and perhaps an unique example, along with the North West Coast Indians, of a long-term persistence of the same economic system over a period of 10,000 years. Despite an apparent homogeneity, increasing data led several Japanese archaeologists to propose a basic model where two settlement forms (labelled "Clumped" and "Dispersed") alternated throughout the Jomon period in conjunction to major climatic events.
My doctoral projects seeks to:
- Test if such claim can be supported from a quantitative perspective
- Assess whether the shared assumption that views settlement change as uniquely determined by cultural response to external environment change can be supported from a theoretical standpoint
- Explore expected response of Hunter-Gatherer settlement system to different "types" of external environment change
In order to answer the first question I have developed a set of quantitative tools which explicitly tackles the problem of temporal uncertainty, while for the second and the third questions I have extended different behavioural ecology models using abstract Agent Based Simulations.
This short presentation will provide a brief overview of the preliminary answers to these research questions, along with some insights on the methodological and theoretical framework I have adopted.
Keywords: Hunter-Gatherers, Behavioural Ecology, Monte-Carlo Methods, Temporal Uncertainty Agent-Based Simulation, Spatial Analysis
Feel free to bring your lunch with you!
Contact
Eleonora Gandolfi, PhD student
Archaeological Computing Research Group
University of Southampton