Revisiting and modelling the woodland farming system of the early Neolithic Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), 5600–4900 b.c.

O Tempora O Mores: Building an Epistemological Procedure for Modeling the Socio-anthropological Factors of Rural Neolithic Socio-ecological Systems: Stakes, Choices, Hypotheses, and Constraints

“…Such a model is necessarily made up of a patchwork of the knowledge of several disciplines. Regarding only Neolithic issues, many modeling attempts have been successfully assessed (Ebersbach, 1999;Kohler and Gumerman, 2000;Dolukhanov and Shukurov, 2003;Janssen et al 2003;Ebersbach and Schade, 2004;Hazelwood and Steele, 2004;Janssen and Scheffer, 2004;Allen et al 2006; Kohler and van der Leeuw, 2007;Altaweel, 2008;Janssen, 2009;Lemmen et al 2009;Tipping et al 2009;Patterson et al 2010;Graves, 2011;Kaplan et al 2012;Kohler et al 2012;Lemmen and Khan, 2012;Yu et al 2012;Carrer, 2013;Baum, 2014;Saqalli et al 2014;Lemmen and Wirtz, 2014;Bernabeu Aubán et al 2015), among others, which the study of Saqalli & Baum (2016) sought to characterize according to scale and conditionalities. This type of model is often built following a spatialized modelling approach with many pixels as pieces of land and many entities, called agents, as households or occasionally individuals: with only pixels, such distributive models are referred to as cellular automata; with agents, they are referred to as agent-based models.…”

“…The importance of encouraging the success of the object as a whole, and not solely one's task in isolation is crucial as is the legitimacy of the objective and the people involved. The goal of a mediation tool, such as the current model, is to "push" each member to look after the consistency of the interacting system, taken as a whole, such as the example of a livestock-keeping society, for instance, rather than the consistency between one thematic in itself: looking for inconsistencies or even impossibilities within the system is then a good way to test the common understanding over an RSES: for instance, in Saqalli et al (2014), the impossibility of feeding the quantity of livestock necessary for producing enough manure to keep permanent fields and not shifting fields as suggested by palynology in Linear Band Keramik farming systems allows the research team to propose a systematic pruning practice as the sole practice that will be sufficiently productive.…”

“…A project (ANR Obresoc) with two divergent objectives, reconstituting the farming system of the LBK and the expansion then decline of this culture across time and space, was even forced to split it in portions with one focusing on the livestock and farming systems (Saqalli et al 2014) and another on 5, the expansion itself.…”

Pathways for Scale and Discipline Reconciliation: Current Socio-Ecological Modelling Methodologies to Explore and Reconstitute Human Prehistoric Dynamics

“…Such a modelling project may be more effective in study sites where environment is not a so blatant challenge. Saqalli et al (2014) describe another spatialized Agent-Based model, which aims was to reconstruct the LBK farming and society system functioning at the village level. The idea was to reconstruct in the same model the functioning along a very local grid level (1ha/ cell) of village societies.…”

“…The World Climate project (Hijmans et al 2005)provide the access to present-day climate data (temperature and rainfall), from which was roughly reconstructed the climate and its variability at that time, as described inSaqalli (2015): The palynology-based climate reconstruction of Ortu et al 2011provides the average Europe temperature and rainfall time deviations with present-day figures, while the World Climate project provides the statistical deviations both in terms of time (seasonal variability based on 50 years of data) and space (with a precision of 10 km x 10 km cells, transposed and adapted to 1ha-cell of the model). The work of Schwartz et al (2011) was used for building the soil properties in the model, and Saqalli (2014)supplied the background for the farming and society system and variability. Processes of reactive adaptation were formalized but no cognitive nor selective appearance of technical or social innovations may occur, i.e.…”