Hi Everyone, I am sharing a model that my coauthor / codeveloper, Muhammad Rehan, and I have put together simulating stone tool behavior at the Early Stone Age site of Olorgesailie (~1 million years-ish old in Kenya). The archaeology details are a bit technical, but the question has always been why early hominins deposited Acheulean handaxes by the bazillion at the Main Site Complex. We (and others) propose that such large accumulations were the result of caching behavior and we have designed this model to test whether such caching behavior might make foraging behavior more efficient; and what circumstances in particular might favor caching. This publication is under consideration at the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory and it was actually one of the referees who suggested posting the model here as a means of sharing it. Good idea! Thanks (!), and if you have any questions or comments, you can contact me directly at [email protected]
e-lorgesailie.nlogox (51.7 KB)
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Sounds very cool! It is a bit hard to understand the model right now because (a) the info tab is blank, (b) because the forage procedure is really long and (c) your code indenting is inconsistent. If you highlight all of your code and press the tab button, it will auto-indent your code so that it is clear which code is nested inside of which if statements. I recommend breaking up the forage procedure into subprocedures (with informative names) to make it more readable. Also, it looks like you are using a bunch of if statements in a row that are meant to be mutually exclusive (e.g., if levymove = 0 and if levymove = 1). It would be easier to understand and less likely to be buggy to use multi-branch ifelse statments (see the end of the ifelse entry in the dictionary).
I hope this gets published! Also, we don’t have any archeology models in the NetLogo models library. This one or a similar one could be a good fit if you are interested in getting a model in the library.
(Also, I’m moving this post to “Share and Showcase” category).
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Hi Jacob,
Thanks for the note! There is a bit of awkwardness here in the sense that I would much rather be doing all of this with an accepted paper and a finalized model. I would love for this to be added to model library along with all of the documentation (the ODD+D description), etc, bu all that is under peer review at the moment, and so I don’t feel like I can share it? At the same time, a referee instructed us to share the model (!) and to do so in the Netlogo forum. It’s kind of a Catch 22!
So, my sincere hope is that we will submitted the revisions in the next week or two, it will get accepted, and we can make some cosmetic changes to make everything more readable. Then we can repost it in the forum and work on adding it to the models library (if it is deemed a worthy addition!).
Thanks again for getting in touch. I’m also planning on coming to the conference in Chicago this summer. Maybe I’ll see you there?!
Best,
Grant
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That all sounds good and yes, I will be at the conference!