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

Abstract

The start and end of the urban phase of the Indus civilization (IC; c. 2500 to 1900 BC) are often linked with climate change, specifically regarding trends in the intensity of summer and winter precipitation and its effect on the productivity of local food economies. The Indus Village is a modular agent-based model designed as a heuristic “sandbox” to investigate how IC farmers could cope with diverse and changing environments and how climate change could impact the local and regional food production levels required for maintaining urban centers. The complete model includes dedicated submodels about weather, topography, soil properties, crop dynamics, food storage and exchange, nutrition, demography, and farming decision-making. In this paper, however, we focus on presenting the parts required for generating crop dynamics, including the submodels involved (weather, soil water, land, and crop models) and how they are combined progressively to form two integrated models (land water and land crop models). Furthermore, we describe and discuss the results of six simulation experiments, which highlight the roles of seasonality, topography, and crop diversity in understanding the potential impact of environmental variability, including climate change, in IC food economies. We conclude by discussing a broader consideration of risk and risk mitigation strategies in ancient agriculture and potential implications to the sustainability of the IC urban centres.

SAGAscape: Simulating Resource Exploitation Strategies in Iron Age to Hellenistic Communities in Southwest Anatolia

“…This stands in contrast with several other ABMs where randomly generated settlements with alterable, migrating populations engage in agriculture and/or material sourcing. For examples, see MayaSim (Heckbert 2013, Heckbert et al 2016), Indus Village (Angourakis et al 2020(Angourakis et al , 2022 and the family of models produced by the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP) (Kohler et al 2012, Crabtree et al 2017.…”

“…Conversely, VEP models rely on high-resolution tree ring data for precipitation and temperature reconstructions and ensuing land productivity (Crabtree et al 2017). Indus Village is based on a number of interconnected submodels determining weather, terrain characteristics, soil water availability and crop productivity (Angourakis et al 2022). The MedLand modelling laboratory (MML) further integrates land use and erosion/deposition processes by coupling models across programming languages (Barton et al 2016).…”

The impact of climate change on the agriculture and the economy of Southern Gaul: New perspectives of agent-based modelling

“…• Socio-environmental relations: interaction between societies, the environment and climate (e.g. [98][99][100]).…”