Abstract
The Zambezi plateau region in Southern Africa experienced the rise and fall of polities with different levels of inequality and complexity—known as cycling—for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans and the beginning of the region’s written history. We address the enduring research question of explaining politogenesis and polity cycling: the recurrent rise, fall, and abandonment of the earliest polities with monumental structures (such as massive stone-wall enclosures) called zimbabwes, built between ca. 1200 and 1450 CE. The agent-based model (ABM) presented here, called ZambeziLand, supports an explanation based on the Canonical Theory. In this theory, a succession of opportunities (situational changes) to engage in collective action by a community strengthens or weakens the complexity of the polity. The main finding from the ZambeziLand ABM simulation is that individual micro-level dynamics, driven by leadership and sentiments of loyalty to the community, can generate collective, macro-level behaviors observed in the archaeological record of the Zambezi Plateau.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was prepared by the first author, who also wrote the original model code, for the Seminar on Origins of Social Complexity, Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Fall 2012, taught by the second author. This version was extensively revised by both authors for presentation at the Conference on Simulating the Past to Understand Human History, Barcelona, Spain, September 3–4, 2014, organized and chaired by Juan Antonio Barceló, Autonomous University of Barcelona. All errors are the responsibility of the authors, who declare no conflicts of interest. Thanks to Jeff Bassett for introducing the authors to ShareLaTeX, the online system used to write and compile this paper while maintaining a single version, and to Henry Oswald and James Allen of the ShareLaTeX team in the UK for enabling this collaborative result (and others to follow).
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Bogle, G., Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2016). ZambeziLand: A Canonical Theory and Agent-Based Model of Polity Cycling in the Zambezi Plateau, Southern Africa. In: Barceló, J., Del Castillo, F. (eds) Simulating Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31481-5_13
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