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

近东的早期城市聚落为研究人类与环境的长期相互作用提供了理想的实验室，因为它们提供了大量的考古和文本数据，可以纳入跨越数千年的整体社会、经济和环境分析框架中。这项研究项目将模拟并试图解释青铜时代聚落系统在今天的叙利亚和伊拉克的雨养和灌溉地区的发展和消亡轨迹。该项目的目标是开发一个整体的、动态的、基于对象的模型，该模型可以帮助确定社会或多或少变得城市化或甚至崩溃的条件。研究人员将研究为什么公元前三千年和公元前四千年的美索不达米亚南部灌溉区的城市比雨水灌溉的北部城市的规模和复杂性更大。传统模式通常认为城市是由至高无上的权威建立的。尽管该模型将检验这种自上而下的观点，但该项目将强调自下而上的定居点系统开发。复杂适应系统的概念将被用来检验这一假设，即早期城市及其区域的系统在与其环境的密切关系中共同进化，主要是通过较小的基本单位(家庭)随时间聚集的方式。基于代理的建模将允许广泛的选择和轨迹对建模练习的结果做出贡献。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FEET)。DIAS框架允许一系列模拟模型和其他应用程序协同工作，以解决复杂的建模问题。它将包括气候(GCM)、天气(MM5)、水文和农业(EPIC/SWAT)以及人口模型和使用刻面框架建立的基于主体的社会行为模型。输入数据将来自芝加哥大学东方研究所和其他地方的景观数据、碑文数据和区域规模的环境研究的大型语料库。模拟的定居点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。到该项目结束时，研究人员预计将开发出一个具有相关用户界面的通用建模框架，使人与环境之间的相互作用能够在长达数千年的时间内得到严格测试。这项工作的预期结果是，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，这是生态管理的基础，适用范围非常广泛。此外，研究耦合的人类和自然系统作为过去社会崩溃的一个原因的相互作用也是至关重要的。城市及其腹地是最复杂的自然和人类耦合系统，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。该项目将对人与环境之间复杂的相互作用提供新的见解，并将有助于研究城市化的过去和现在。拟议的建模框架还具有作为教育工具的潜在效用，因为它将使学术和普通用户能够与复杂的环境、文化和社会经济数据库互动，以模拟住区和城市的增长并分析长期的可持续性概念。该项目得到了2002财年环境中生物复杂性特别竞赛的一个奖项的支持，该竞赛的重点是自然和人类耦合系统的动力学。

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.