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

BE/CNH：动态环境和经济中的结算系统：美索不达米亚北部和南部城市地区对比

• 批准号: 0216548
• 负责人: McGuire Gibson
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-08-15 至 2008-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0216548&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CNH; Settlement; Systems; Within; Dynamic

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.

近东的早期城市定居点为研究长期的人类与环境的相互作用提供了一个理想的实验室，因为它们提供了大量的考古和文本数据，这些数据可以纳入数千年来的整体社会，经济和环境分析框架。 该研究项目将模拟并试图解释现代叙利亚和伊拉克雨养和灌溉区青铜时代定居系统的发展和消亡轨迹。 该项目的目标是开发一个整体的，动态的，基于对象的模型，可以帮助确定社会变得或多或少城市化甚至崩溃的条件。 调查人员将研究为什么公元前第三和第四千年的城市在南部美索不达米亚灌溉区增长到更大的规模和复杂性比那些在雨水灌溉的北部。 传统模式通常认为城市是由过度权威建立的。 虽然该模型将测试这样一个自上而下的角度来看，该项目将强调解决系统的发展，从地面上。 复杂适应系统的概念将被用来检验这一假设，即早期城市及其地区的系统与其环境密切相关，主要是通过较小的基本单位（家庭）的时间聚集而共同进化的。 基于代理的建模将允许广泛的选择和轨迹，以促进建模工作的结果。 模拟将采用由阿贡国家实验室决策和信息科学部设计的先进的基于对象的框架（DIAS和FACET）。 DIAS框架允许一系列仿真模型和其他应用程序一起工作，以解决复杂的建模问题。 它将包括气候（GCM），天气（MM 5），水文和农业（EPIC / SWAT），人口模型以及使用FACET框架构建的基于代理的社会行为模型。 输入数据将来自于芝加哥大学东方研究所和其他地方的大型景观数据、金石数据和区域规模的环境研究。 模拟定居系统将根据实地调查和卫星遥感记录的考古景观进行验证。 到项目结束时，研究人员预计已经开发出一个通用的建模框架，与相关的用户界面，将使人类与环境之间的相互作用进行严格的测试，在长达几千年的时间。这项工作的预期结果，提高了对人类如何与动态生态和气候机制相互作用的理解，是生态管理的基础，适用范围非常广泛。 此外，研究人类和自然系统相互作用作为过去社会崩溃的原因也具有根本重要性。 城市及其绿地是最复杂的自然和人类系统，城市系统将继续在塑造地球未来方面发挥越来越重要的作用。 该项目将为人与环境之间复杂的相互作用提供新的见解，并将有助于研究过去和现在的城市化。 拟议的建模框架也有潜在的效用作为一种教育工具，因为它将使学术和一般用户与复杂的环境，文化和社会经济数据库进行交互，以模拟住区和城市的增长，并分析长期的可持续发展的概念。 该项目得到了2002财政年度环境中生物复杂性特别竞赛的资助，该竞赛侧重于自然和人类系统耦合的动力学。