NSF Award Abstract - #0216548

AWSFL008-DS3

BE/CNH: Settlement Systems Within a Dynamic Environment and Economy: Contrasting
Northern and Southern Mesopotamian City Regions

Abstract

The early urban settlements in the Near East provide an ideal laboratory for the study of long-term human-environment interactions because they offer an enormous array of archaeological and textual data that can be incorporated into an overall social, economic, and environmental analytical framework stretching over several millennia. This research project will model and attempt to explain trajectories of development and demise of Bronze Age settlement systems for both the rain-fed and the irrigated zones of modern-day Syria and Iraq. The project goals are to develop a holistic, dynamic, object-based model that can help determine the conditions under which societies became more or less urban or even collapsed. The investigators will examine why third and fourth millennium B.C. cities in the irrigated zone of southern Mesopotamia grew to a greater size and complexity than those in the rain-fed north. Traditional models often view cities as being founded by an over-arching authority. Although the model will test such a top-down perspective, the project will emphasize settlement system development from the ground up. Concepts of complex adaptive systems will be used to test the hypothesis that systems of early cities and their regions co-evolved in an intimate relationship with their environment, primarily by means of aggregation through time of smaller fundamental units (households). Agent-based modeling will allow a wide range of choices and trajectories to contribute to the outcome of the modeling exercise. Simulation will employ advanced object-based frameworks (DIAS and FACET) designed by the Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory. The DIAS framework allows a range of simulation models and other applications to work together to address a complex modeling problem. It will incorporate climate (GCM), weather (MM5), hydrological and agricultural (EPIC / SWAT), and demographic models plus agent-based models of social behavior built using the FACET framework. Input data will be derived from the large corpus of landscape data, epigraphic data, and regional-scale environmental studies housed within the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and elsewhere. The simulated settlement system will be validated against the archaeological landscape as it has been recorded by field surveys and satellite remote sensing. By the end of the project, investigators expect to have developed a general modeling framework with an associated user interface that will enable interactions between humans and the environment to be rigorously tested over periods as long as several millennia.

The expected result of this work, improved understanding how humans interact with dynamic ecological and climatic mechanisms, is fundamental to ecological management and is applicable very broadly. In addition, studies of the interplay of coupled human and natural systems as a cause of collapse of past societies are also of fundamental importance. Cities and their hinterlands are among the most complex coupled natural and human systems, and urban systems will continue to play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of the planet. This project will provide new insights into the complex interactions between people and their environment, and it will contribute to the study of urbanization past and present. The proposed modeling framework also has potential utility as an educational tool, because it will enable both academic and general users to interact with complex environmental, cultural, and socio-economic databases in order to simulate the growth of settlements and cities and to analyze long term concepts of sustainability. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2002 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.