Trowels, Processors and Misunderstandings: Concluding Thoughts

Abstract

This conclusive text deals with the challenges of interdisciplinarity: Although conceptual and formal thresholds are well known within the scientific community, one may encounter difficulties for answering such related requirements: among them, the tension between the inherent holistic pretence of modelling and datarelated prosaicism is important as well as the simple fact that things, practices, assumptions and words are not the same among disciplines inducing unsolved misconceptions, misunderstandings and social bias. Also, seeking legitimacy and validity but also efficiency at the modelling project level, implying simplifications, interpolations an generalizations, is often in contradiction with the need for legitimacy at the level of each discipline involved. This is due of course to potentially contradictory scientific requirements of both levels and for a weight at least equivalent to the perfectly normal social need for recognition of each researcher, usually within its own discipline, to compare with the risky "business" in terms of reputation, results' over-expectation and time consumption of modelling approaches.Research community; social constraints to interdisciplinarity; go-and-return between fields and models; Supporting the holistic hope of ArchaeologyArchaeology, under its many theoretical variants, had always had a complex relationship with its selfacknowledged role as the gatekeeper of the past intricacy of all facets of human life over the very longue durée. Having to deal with a record first and foremost characterised by his patchiness and unevenness is to some extent counter-balanced by extraordinary access to an exciting diversity of sources, reflected by the countless methodological and technical refinements of the last few decades. We know that our window unto the past will always remain clouded in much haze, but we are constantly nudging it a bit more open. As a result, and perhaps more so than any other social sciences, most archaeologists -explicitly or not -seem to subscribe to a Zeitgeist dominated by the idea that their discipline's goal is to explore the complexity of cultural and social human life in its entirety while at the same time avoiding the meta-synthesis "original sin", more or less the same positioning as anthropologists for present-time social science.Well in line with the wider intellectual ethos of their time, foundational texts of what came to be known as processual archaeology are dominated by one of the various versions of system theory (e.g. Doran 1970, Salmon 1978. This trend is most noticeable in David Clarke's contribution with his conceptualisation of several specialised sub-systems all locked in many interaction and feedback loops (Clarke, 1968).

Developing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Sustainability Challenges: The Need to Model Socio-Environmental Systems in the Longue Durée

“…We propose formal computational modelling as a platform for solving many of these issues. We acknowledge that we are far from the first to highlight the potential of modelling for the study of SES (e.g., [111][112][113][114][115]), and here we draw on some of this work to explore these challenges in more depth, namely: (a) how modelling can be effectively deployed as a transdisciplinary platform; (b) the incommensurability of different data; (c) the question of which scale(s) to work in; and (d) the practicalities of transdisciplinary work in the current academic landscape. In the process, we identify ways in which modelling may help overcome these challenges.…”

“…Attempts to address this, for instance by formalizing criteria for comparing results beyond a simple juxtaposition of data collections, can be interpreted as overbearing attempts to encroach into other disciplines and consequently met by academic 'boundary policing'. The corollary of this is of course that genuine transdisciplinarity requires a certain amount of trust between disciplines [114]. Not everyone-perhaps no one individual-in the team will genuinely understand at a fundamental level every aspect of the project: if they did, there would be no need for collaboration.…”

“…However, even where the transdisciplinary spirit is willing, the practicalities of academia may provide additional constraints. A more detailed discussion of some of the logistical and practical barriers to transdisciplinarity are provided in Saqalli and Vander Linden [114]. Key points here are that although research bodies and institutions have over the past couple of decades increasingly favored transdisciplinarity, at least officially, considerable evidence in fact suggests that transdisciplinary proposals are less successful at attracting funding than traditional individual discipline-based ones (e.g., [186]).…”

“…For instance, Rockman and Hritz [187] argue that, in the USA, the lack of an easily identifiable agency responsible for archaeology and cultural heritage hampers the interaction of both fields with other disciplines and their eventual integration within transdisciplinary initiatives. Meanwhile, Saqalli and Vander Linden [114] note that it takes a lot of time and misunderstanding before progressing beyond clichéd understanding of other perspectives, both in the UK and France. Seniority and budget-originated dominations can also have huge impacts on mutual acceptances.…”

Weather, Land and Crops in the Indus Village Model: A Simulation Framework for Crop Dynamics under Environmental Variability and Climate Change in the Indus Civilisation

“…The program has led to the development of the Indus Village, a modular multi-paradigm agent-based simulation model designed to represent environmental and human factors as a single unified system [21]. Modeling has been carried out within the spirit of creating a virtual laboratory for socioecological systems, following a twodecade-wide trend in computational archaeology [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. The Indus Village is directed toward addressing how and when food production diversity is adaptive and, conversely, under which conditions, if at all, such diversity would be adverse to urbanization.…”