Published:
Gabler, Brandon M., 2008. “Ethnic boundary maintenance and historical archaeology from an Agent-based modeling perspective.” In Digital Discovery: Exploring new frontiers in human heritage, edited by Clark, J.T. and E.M. Hagemeister, pp. 42-48. Archeolingua Press, Budapest.
Abstract:
Culture contact situations result in unique trends in both the archaeological record and the long-term traditions of the cultures involved. Ethnic boundary maintenance is broadly viewed as the degree that a culture maintains its separate identity in the face of intermixing with other groups. Every situation is unique, but it has been proposed that ethnic boundary maintenance can be measured based on levels of competition, ethnocentrism, and differential power among the various groups. Agent-based modeling allows the direct observation of artificial societies comprised of different ethnicities interacting in response to the three variables above. At the individual level, inter-agent interactions drive the model to varying results dependent upon demographics and variable settings. At the group level, intermixing and patterning are differentially visible at varying parameter settings. This perspective provides measurable and comparable data useful for testing boundary maintenance in mixed ethnicity societies. The results of these simulation experiments suggest that ethnocentrism and power differential are critically bound to each other in the maintenance of ethnic boundaries.
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