One clear trend that can be discerned in the last 15 years of otherwise-rather-protean Southwestern archaeology is a growing recognition that at any given time, demographic productive, and organizational strategies can be quite variable, even within comparatively small regions; that these...

The object of the workshop was to discuss and demonstrate the modeling of artificial societies and to suggest its potential for extending our knowledge about the prehistoric Southwest. Our efforts are part of the much larger questions anthropologists have asked for generations concerning how...

Reciprocity is an ancient and important social practice that evolved in very small-scale societies. In this paper we present an abstract model of the way systems work that are organized through balanced reciprocity (Sahlins 1972:185-275). This model will help us understand the general nature of...

Recent developments in the study of the pehistory of the northern Mogollon and Anasazi areas of the North American Southwest are reviewed, with emphasis on the pre-A.D. 1150 period, in an attempt to identify key empirical results and incipient interpretive directions.

The collapse of ancient societies such as the Mesa Verde-region pre-Hispanic Pueblos has puzzled generations of scientists. Many explanations for particular cases have been suggested, from combinations of social, political and economic factors (Tainter 1988), to climatic factors such as drought....

It is sometimes thought that philosophers have little to offer those who think about the science of complex systems. There are, however, two philosophical ideas that seem crucial in considering the very definition of complexity. The first is the distinction between "ontology" and "epistemology",...

The widespread use and proven profitability of technical trading rules in financial markets has long been a puzzle in academic finance. In this paper we show, using an agent-based model of an evolving stock market, that widespread technical trading can arise due to a multi-person prisoners'...

Incomplete information, local interaction, and random matching games all share a common structure. A type or player interacts with various subsets of the set of all types/players. A type/player's total payoff is additive in the payoffs from these various interactions. This paper describes a...

An important puzzle in the study of complex systems is the conditions under which the aggregation of information from interacting agents results in a stable or an unstable collective outcome. We present a general framework for thinking about the stability and instability of collective outcomes...

Where genetically unrelated members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of self-regarding, outcome-oriented preferences. We call this strong reciprocity. We distinguish...