Computational Models of State Formation

国家是从社会演变过程中出现的最复杂和最强大的结构之一。长期以来，研究人员一直对复杂的社会实体从较低层次的社会结构及其支持的经济中出现的过程感兴趣。该项目的目标是制作一个大规模的基于知识的计算模型，以墨西哥瓦哈卡谷的蒙特阿尔班为中心，研究萨波特克国的起源。虽然世界各地都出现了古老的国家，但硅谷的相对孤立使得那里的社会演变过程更加明显。为此，1970年的S和1980年的S期间的瓦哈卡聚落调查对山谷进行了广泛的调查，记录了3,000多个考古遗址的位置和特征。这些数据和提取的知识在这里被用来构建一个分布式的、基于知识的山谷状态形成模型。然后，该模型被用来检验关于复杂社会系统出现的各种假说。这些假设包括主要是关于骑自行车、水力专制、社会界限和领土扩张战略对国家形成的影响的问题。

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.