Computational Models of State Formation

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A state is among the most sophisticated and powerful structures that has emerged from the social evolution process. The processes by which complex social entities have emerged from lower level social structures and their supporting economies have long been of prime interest to researchers. The goal of this project is to produce a large-scale knowledge-based computational model of the origins of the Zapotec State, centered at Monte Alban, in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. While archaic states have emerged in various parts of the world, the relative isolation of the valley has allowed the process of social evolution to be more visible there. To this end, extensive surveys of the valley have been made by the Oaxaca Settlement Survey in the 1970's and 1980's. The locations and features of over 3,000 archaeological sites have been documented. These data and the extracted knowledge are used here to construct a distributed, knowledge-based model of state formation in the valley. The model is then used to test various hypotheses concerning the emergence of complex social systems. These hypotheses include questions about the impact of chiefly cycling, hydraulic despotism, social circumscription, and strategies for territorial expansion on state formation.