Prof’s research featured in Scientific American magazine

PULLMAN — The work of Washington State University anthropology professor Timothy A. Kohler will be highlighted in the July 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.

 

Utilizing grants from the National Science Foundation, Kohler is principal investigator of a project that is helping to create new understanding about settlement system changes in the U.S. Southwest between A.D. 600 and 1300.

“I think what is especially interesting to the scientific community,” Kohler said, “is that our research combines traditional archaeological methods with high-tech tools, including computer modeling and imaging. We are finding that our simulations, using new agent-based modeling tools, help us to put the results of traditional archaeology into a more meaningful context.”

Kohler coauthored the Scientific American article with researchers George J. Gumerman and Robert G. Reynolds.

His research team, which also includes graduate students and other faculty at WSU and archaeologists at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado, uses agent-based modeling to reconstruct land use by Puebloan peoples in the Central Mesa Verde region in Colorado. Their new research methods allow the team to weigh the importance of multiple factors such as hunting, availability of fuel wood, water and changing agricultural production on regional settlement patterns and on the number of people who can make a living on the landscape.

“Computer models can provide basic insights regarding how individuals, households and even entire societies may have interacted with their natural environment,” said Thomas Baerwald, National Science Foundation Program Director and administrator of Kohler’s NSF grant. “There may be parallels between what happened in a historical context and what is going on in these regions today.”

“One of the great benefits of computer simulation is that it allows researchers to conduct experiments, a luxury that is otherwise impossible in an historical science such as archaeology. We have found that virtual households often affect their environment in ways that limit the options of their offspring and even limit their long-term survival. In addition to illuminating the distant past, these simulations may point to methods for sustaining natural resources in the future,” researchers say in the article.

Kohler joined the WSU faculty in 1978. In addition to his work with this NSF-funded biocomplexity project, Kohler has directed excavations in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. He is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, N.M., and a research associate at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado.

Computer simulations help scientists answer questions that archeological evidence alone cannot.  Researchers simulated the settlement and farmable land patterns of the Puebloan people living in Arizona’s Long House Valley from 1170 A.D. to 1305 A.D. and then compared the models (upper) with archeological evidence of actual settlement patterns in the region (lower).  The models closely matched the archeological record until about 1300 A.D. Both show changes that coincide with a drought during the late 1200s. However, the model did not predict what happened around 1300 A.D., when the Pueboleans completely abandoned the Long House Valley. Simulations indicate the region could have supported a small number of settlements. Environmental conditions alone cannot explain why the region was abandoned abruptly 700 years ago leading researchers to conclude that the change was due to social, political or other factors not included in the model.

Required map illustration credit: illustration by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

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