Land use, water and Mediterranean landscapes: modelling long-term dynamics of complex socio-ecological systems

Abstract

The evolution of Mediterranean landscapes during the Holocene has been increasingly governed by the complex interactions of water and human land use. Different land-use practices change the amount of water flowing across the surface and infiltrating the soil, and change water's ability to move surface sediments. Conversely, water amplifies the impacts of human land use and extends the ecological footprint of human activities far beyond the borders of towns and fields. Advances in computational modelling offer new tools to study the complex feedbacks between land use, land cover, topography and surface water. The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics project (MedLand) is building a modelling laboratory where experiments can be carried out on the long-term impacts of agropastoral land use, and whose results can be tested against the archaeological record. These computational experiments are providing new insights into the socio-ecological consequences of human decisions at varying temporal and spatial scales.

Sistemas complejos adaptativos y simulación computacional en Arqueología

“…Prehist., 74, N.º 1, enero-junio 2017, pp. 9-25, ISSN: 0082-5638 doi: 10.3989/tp.2017.12181 y la evolución humana y/o cultural (Conolly et al 2008;Barton et al 2010;Kohler y Varien 2012;Crema et al 2014a;Pardo Gordó et al 2015).…”

Sustainably Managing Reservoir Storage: Ancient Roots of a Modern Challenge

“…Recognizing the dynamic variability of these factors-particularly through time-is one way in which to avoid simplified uni-lineal histories that view the development of water supply practices as necessarily from "simple" to "complex", and from "small-scale" to "large-scale". Instead, a socio-environmental approach encourages those searching for sustainability in past water supply systems to identify the specific contexts that characterized them, whether they are temporal, geographic, social, or environmental [25].…”

“…These perspectives recognize the relative weight of the sociocultural and biophysical variables that affect human communities' ability to construct and maintain (among other things) water supply structures [25]. For example, understanding the construction and placement of dams throughout the Roman Mediterranean (ca.…”

Trends in Archaeological Simulation

“…At present the only other well-developed agentbased model of broadly similar scope and purpose is Wilkinson et al's (Christiansen and Altaweel 2006;Wilkinson et al 2007a, b) model of household production and exchange in the late prehistoric and Bronze Age societies that developed at the onset of urbanization in Mesopotamia. However, in addition, Barton et al are building a household-level agent-based model of agropastoralism (Barton et al 2010b) as part of a long-term project on the long-term human 'socioecological dynamics' of Mediterranean landscapes (Barton et al 1999;McClure et al 2009); this model will couple with their already well-developed framework for simulating environmental change using GIS (Barton et al 2010a). These three projects share four characteristics: explicit concern with long-term human-environment interaction couched in terms of human ecodynamics, a high degree of realism, comparison of simulated output with rich archaeological datasets (see for commentary on the kinds of data required for modelling socio-ecological systems using agent-based modelling) and the longevity of the projects themselves.…”