Opinion: Building a better past with the help of agent-based modeling.

With a few exceptions, the distant past is an anonymous land occupied by people who made things and left behind a cryptic record of broken pieces. Even when the written word comes into play in human history and we can read the hieroglyphs naming an Egyptian pharaoh and describing royal achievements, the majority of human experience remains unknown and unrecoverable. Archaeologists usually excavate to gather physical evidence from ruins, monuments, and artifacts, which become data streams for the interpretation of past societies. Basic excavation is supplemented by a variety of scientific and historical research methods, all of which are far removed from observing the actual experiences of individuals in the past. The result is that aggregated categories such as households, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and civilizations become the units of analysis. These categories are incredibly important, but they are often used because finer analytical levels are unavailable. Furthermore, the aggregate categories are typically implemented under expectations of classical science, such as equilibrium outcomes that assume normal distributions as well as