School of Human Evolution and Social Change

Agent-based modelling has become an increasingly important tool for scholars studying social and social-ecological systems, but there are no community standards on describing, implementing, testing and teaching these tools. This paper reports on the establishment of the Open Agent-Based Modelling Consortium, www.openabm.org, a community effort to foster the agent-based modelling development, communication, and dissemination for research, practice and education.

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.

In previous research, the SE-NW time-trend in the age of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe has been treated as a signal of a global-scale process that brought farming/herding economies to the continent. Residual variation from this global time-trend is generally treated as ‘noise’. A Com- plex Adaptive Systems perspective views this empirical record differently. The apparent time-trend is treated as an emergent consequence of the interactions of individuals and groups of different scale.
Here, we examine the dynamics of agricultural dispersals, using the rich body evidence available from the Iberian Peninsula as a case study. We integrate two complementary approaches: (1) creating a high resolution Agent Based Modeling environment to simulate different processes that may have driven the spread of farming; (2) collecting and synthesizing empirical archeological data for the earliest Neolithic settlements that we use to evaluate our models results.
Our results suggest that, (a) the source of radiocarbon data used to evaluate alternative hypotheses play an important role in the results; and (b) the model scenario that produces de best fit with archeological data implies a dispersal via northwestern and southern routes; a preference for leap-frog movement; an influence of ecological conditions (selecting most favorable agricultural land) and demographic factors (avoiding settled regions).
This work represents a first attempt at high-resolution bottom-up modeling of this important dynamic in human prehistory. While we recognize that other social and environmental drivers could have also affected the dispersal of agropastoral systems, those considered here include many that have been widely considered important in prior research and so warrant inclusion.

Our study assesses the influence of differences in terrain and locomotor energetics on the land-use strategies and settlement patterns of Levantine Neanderthals and Modern Human – Early Upper Paleolithic groups through a digital application of site catchment analysis. Our findings indicate that Neanderthals habitually commanded smaller site exploitation territories (SETs), principally situated in the rugged Mediterranean Woodlands of the Levant, whereas early Upper Paleolithic groups generally enjoyed larger SETs and displayed a more generalized, wider settlement range encompassing both rugged woodland and more regular, level steppe landscapes. The broader implications of these findings may explain the biogeographic limits on the Neanderthal dispersal into Southwest Asia.

In this paper we present a preliminary approach to the survey work carried out in La Canal de Navarrés (Valencia) since 2014 in the framework of the NSF Project " The Emergence of Coupled Natural and Human Landscapes in the Western Mediterranean ". The programme developed follows previous protocols established by us with the novelty of the use of new technologies (electronic devices) with the goal to make more dynamic the analysis of data in a GIS environment. The results confirm the existence, in several open-air locations, of prehistoric artefacts along the valley regarding to a wide chronology (from the final Pleistocene and covering the Holocene) that can be added to the sequence known at the area including Middle Palaeolithic to Bronze Age evidences.

Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site- specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in Europe as a whole. Our recent research highlighted transitions in vegetation communities associated with the arrival of Neolithic agriculture across much of Europe through a segmented regression analysis of over 400 pollen records. In many cases, the timing of these shifts coincides with the arrival of Neolithic agro-pastoral land use, but not all. In this paper, we extend our analysis to focus on how changing climate associated with the early and middle Holocene may help explain vegetation changes not tied to the arrival of the Neolithic. Moreover, we now explore how intensifying land use related to post-Neolithic population growth may have resulted in delayed vegetation responses beyond the initial Neolithic revolution throughout Europe.

For hunter-gatherer groups, the dynamics changes in climate at the end of the last glacial cycle necessitated rearrangement of land use, including shifts in mobility strategies, settlement location. and resource use. We examine these behavioral changes using lithic attribute data as well as spatial distributions of artifacts and features. Using data from intensive survey and excavation, we trace human ecological response through the onset of the current interglacial in central Mediterranean Spain, comparatively far from the margins of the north-temperate ice sheets.

Bioarcheology Biogeochemistry Carbon isotope analysis Ireland Nitrogen isotope analysis Oxygen isotope analysis Radiogenic strontium isotope analysis a b s t r a c t During the early medieval period in Ireland, Dublin was established as the largest Viking settlement on the island in the ninth century AD. A previous biodistance study has suggested that the population of the town consisted of a polyethnic amalgam of immigrant and indigenous. In this study, we use biogeochemistry to investigate paleomobility and paleodiet in archeological human remains from the ninth to eleventh century levels at the sites at Fishamble Street II (National Museum of Ireland excavation number E172), Fishamble Street III (E190) and John's Lane (E173), as well as twelfth-century remains from Wood Quay (E132). Through radiogenic strontium isotope, stable oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope, and elemental concentration analyses, we investigate the origins of the individuals who lived and died in early and late Viking Dublin. Mean archaeological human enamel and bone isotope values from Dublin are 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ¼ 0.70975 AE 0.00139 (2s, n ¼ 22), d 13 C carbonate(V-PDB) ¼ À14.8& AE 0.8& (1s, n ¼ 12), and d 18 O carbonate(V-PDB) ¼ À7.2& AE 1.0& (1s, n ¼ 12). Archaeological human bone samples exhibit mean d 13 C collagen(V-PDB) ¼ À20.8& AE 0.5& (1s, n ¼ 12) and mean d 15 N collagen(AIR) ¼ þ10.0& AE 1.7& (1s, n ¼ 12).

This study provides a histological comparison of the mature regenerated and original tail of the lizard Anolis carolinensis. These data will provide a framework for future studies of this emerging model organism whose genome was recently published. This study demonstrated that the cartilage skeleton of the regenerated tail enclosed a spinal cord with an ependymal core, but there was no evidence that dorsal root ganglia or peripheral nerves are regenerated. The cartilage tube contained foramina that allowed the vasculature to cross, but was otherwise a rigid structure. The original tail has muscle groups arranged in quadrants in a regular pattern that attach to the vertebral column. The regenerated tail has irregular muscle bundles of variable number that form unusual attachments to each other and to the cartilage tube. Furthermore, the data show that there was increased connective tissue within the muscle bundles. Implications for functionality of the regenerated tail and for future biomechanical studies are discussed.

This paper proposes a new methodology to study prehistoric lithic assemblages in an attempt to derive from that facet of prehistoric behavior the greater technoeconomic system in which it was embedded. By using volumetric artifact density and the frequency of retouched pieces within a given lithic assemblage, it becomes possible to identify whether these stone tools were created by residentially mobile or logistically organized foragers. The linking factor between assemblage composition and land-use strategy is that of curation within lithic assemblages as an expression of economizing behavior. This method is used to study eight sites from southeastern Italy to detect changes in adaptation during the Late Pleistocene. We compare and contrast Mousterian, Uluzzian, proto-Aurignacian and Epigravettian assemblages, and argue that the first three industries overlap considerably in terms of their technoeconomic flexibility. Epigravettian assemblages, on the other hand, display a different kind of land-use exploitation pattern than those seen in the earlier assemblages, perhaps as a response to deteriorating climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum. While we discuss the implications of these patterns in the context of modern human origins, we argue that the methodology can help identify land-use patterns in other locales and periods.

In spite of an active and sophisticated archaeological research program, the Paleolithic of the Iberian peninsula remains comparatively little known to English-speaking prehistorians, with the exception of Cantabrian Spain. The rich data set compiled by Spanish prehistorians and their colleagues over the past several decades stands to make a valuable and unique contribution to our understanding of the Pleistocene prehistory of Europe. We present a detailed overview of Upper Paleolithic chronology, sites, and assemblages for Mediterranean Spain, an area of over 1,600,000 km 2 that extends from the French border to the Straits of Gibraltar. To interpret these data, we employ a regional perspective that emphasizes studies of paleoeconomy (especially zooarchaeology) and settlement. The Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition and Upper Paleolithic art also receive detailed treatment, and the Upper Paleolithic of Mediterranean Spain is discussed in the broader context of the late Upper Pleistocene of western Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.