Modeling Human-Environmental Interactions in Inner Asia: Households to Empires

The history of Inner Asia includes the emergence of empires beginning with the Xiongnu at 200 B.C. and culminating with the Mongol empire of the 13^th and 14^th centuries.  Unlike early complex societies associated with agriculture in the river valleys of China, the Near East, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America, the major polities of Inner Asia created political systems based on concepts of mobility, expansive scale, extra-local interactions, non-fixed property, dispersed control hierarchies, and the economics of multi-resource pastoralism.  Using diachronic data from written sources and from three archaeological projects situated in Mongolian, two agent-based computational models were developed to generate the emergence of multi-scale networks over space and time. The scale of the project extends over the last 3,000 years of human history.  The challenges of contemporary environmental change highlight the need to assess the potential for long-term sustainability and resilience in a variety of social systems.  The two models explore interactions at the household level (HouseholdsWorld) and at the regional level (Hierarchies).  Both are written in the MASON system for simulation modeling, utilizing platform independence in Java, and separate of computation from visualization.  HouseholdsWorld is spatially referenced to specific landscapes in Inner Asia.  GIS capabilities are integrated with biomass and other characteristics utilized by households that “live” on the landscape.  In Hierarchies the basic units are the regionally discreet social groups on the scale of large lineages with emergent control hierarchies.  Through differential resources and management characteristics confederations emerge with increasingly complex political networks and large integrated territories, on the scale of empires.  Results from the HouseholdsWorld model show volatility of pastoralist economies resulting from weather events (droughts and snow storms).  The observed emergence of new steady states offers the opportunity to hypothesize sustainability under dynamic conditions.  At the regional level emerging polities in the Hierarchies model initiate wars, consolidate territories, and sometimes disintegrate.  Strategies for success illustrate the viability of specific forms of hierarchy complexity.  The scale and duration of polity formation in Hierarchies approximates known empirical data and offers the opportunity for further experimentation in the analysis of theories of the development of early complex societies.