Agent-Based Modeling of the Early Minoan Social Organization Structure

In this work, we develop a generic agent-based model (ABM) for simulating ancient societies. Agents in our model are completely autonomous, in contrast to most existing ABMs used in archaeology. We employ this model to evaluate the impact of different social organization paradigms and agricultural strategies on population viability and evolving spatial distribution of settlement locations, at a particular region of the island of Crete during the Early Bronze Age (early Minoan civilization). Model parameter choices are based on archaeological studies, but are not biased towards any specific assumption. Interestingly, one of the social models examined is inspired by a recent framework for self-organizing agent organizations. Results over a number of different simulation scenarios demonstrate an impressive sustainability for settlements adopting a socio-economic organization model based on self-organization; while the emerging “stratified” populations are larger than their egalitarian counterparts. This provides support for archaeological theories proposing the existence of different social strata in Early Bronze Age Crete, considering them a pre-requisite for the emergence of the complex social structure evident in later periods. Moreover, observed population dispersion agrees with existing archaeological evidence.