Skip to content

Releases: jgregoriods/expand

expand

14 Aug 17:00
0e9582a
Compare
Choose a tag to compare

This is an agent-based model for simulating the demic expansion of tropical forest farmers in late Holocene South America. Over the last 5000 years, archaeological cultures like the Saladoid-Barrancoid and Tupiguarani expanded over different parts of Amazon and beyond, spreading the practice of polyculture agroforestry. Can these archaeological expansions be modelled as demic waves of advance similar to what has been proposed for the Neolithic in Eurasia? Model results are assessed by comparing simulated arrival times with radiocarbon dates. Similar models, where human expansions are determined by population growth, fission and relocation, have been developed for the spread of farming in Europe (Fort et al. 2012; Isern et al. 2017). The same concept is adopted here, with the rules of the model informed by the ethnography of tropical forest farmers. For a complete description of the model, see Souza et al. (2020).