Agent-based modeling of innovation spreading in ancient times

Spreading of cultural, social and technological ideas always had a great influence on humanity. Studying such processes and developing new approaches for their modeling, prediction and control has gained a lot of attention in recent years. However, when considering spreading processes that happened in ancient times, we face new challenges: most of the existing archaeological data is sparse and uncertain; lots of information is unknown and there is no procedure to repeat the history and obtain new data.

In this talk, we will present a new framework for modelling of such processes on an example of the wool-bearing sheep spreading in the Near East and Europe, between 6200 and 4200 BC. The introduction of wool had an important influence on the growth of the textile production and had strongly affected the socioeconomic development of past societies. Our new agent-based model combines a data-driven dynamics of human movements with a time-evolving network for possible social interactions. This approach offers an instructive way for studying the qualitative effect of different aspects on the speed and spatial evolution of spreading processes in ancient times, such as: geographic, climatic and cultural aspects.