Thursday, July 07, 2016

"A simulation of the Neolithic transition in the Indus valley"

I didn't know arxiv.org carried papers on this subject:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1091

Emphasis added.
A simulation of the Neolithic transition in the Indus valley
Carsten Lemmen, Aurangzeb Khan

(Submitted on 5 Oct 2011 (v1), last revised 7 May 2012 (this version, v3))
The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was one of the first great civilizations in prehistory. This bronze age civilization flourished from the end of the fourth millennium BC. It disintegrated during the second millennium BC; despite much research effort, this decline is not well understood. Less research has been devoted to the emergence of the IVC, which shows continuous cultural precursors since at least the seventh millennium BC. To understand the decline, we believe it is necessary to investigate the rise of the IVC, i.e., the establishment of agriculture and livestock, dense populations and technological developments 7000--3000 BC. Although much archaeological information is available, our capability to investigate the system is hindered by poorly resolved chronology, and by a lack of field work in the intermediate areas between the Indus valley and Mesopotamia. We thus employ a complementary numerical simulation to develop a consistent picture of technology, agropastoralism and population developments in the IVC domain. Results from this Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator show that there is (1) fair agreement between the simulated timing of the agricultural transition and radiocarbon dates from early agricultural sites, but the transition is simulated first in India then Pakistan; (2) an independent agropastoralism developing on the Indian subcontinent; and (3) a positive relationship between archeological artifact richness and simulated population density which remains to be quantified.
The authors point to a possible center of rice domestication ("Lahuredawa in the middle Ganges plains") as a possible source of agropastoralism.
Less favored by the model are the valleys along the Indo-Iranian plateau, where broad subsistence possibilities are seen as one precondition for the rise of the IVC and where agropastoralism arose before 6500 BC [Jarrige, 1995]. The model might underestimate the potential for agropastoralism in this area because of its coarse spatial scale.

FYI: Definition of agropastoral. : of or relating to a practice of agriculture that includes both the growing of crops and the raising of livestock.

No comments:

Post a Comment