Achievement

IPEM PI Kohler and trainee Bocinsky collaborated on completing several major products for the Village Ecodynamics Project last year, as detailed elsewhere in this report. Among our major findings: --greatly increased raising of domesticated turkey in the northern US Southwest in the 11th-century AD was motivated in great part by previous depression of (wild) deer populations; --Villages form out of smaller hamlets in our study area in SW Colorado in response to both population density and intensity of warfare. It is probable that there are positive returns to scale from aggregation and we are investigating these effects using evolutionary public-goods games in an agent-based-modeling framework. --Comparison of simulated household placement with that known from the archaeological record reveals that households were located increasingly more efficiently with respect to critical resources throughout the AD 600-920 period, and that efficiency also peaked in the late AD 1200s.