Regardless of location of archaeological finds--royal tombs to refuse dumps--questions of how the people who left objects lived persist among both professionals and interested laypeople. If written records have been preserved, much of the guesswork is eliminated. However, prehistoric and nonliterate societies left no records--just the work of their hands.

To seek explanations is a truly human trait. It is possible to infer the diets, agriculture, economies and trade networks, and political and religious principles from physical evidence. Describing and understanding the dynamics of changes in these societies is much more difficult. Narrative descriptions have taken this role in the past. However, many of them are quite speculative.

Computer simulation of ancient societies can provide additional credibility to the narratives by producing results that demonstrate consistency with the narratives and with the archaeological evidence available. This book in Springer’s “Computational Social Sciences” series originated in the session on “Simulating the Past to Understand Human History” at the 2014 Conference of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA).

There are 14 chapters in this book. The first chapter is a critical review of the subject written by the editors; it comprises 35 percent of the book. It is a nontechnical introduction to computational social science, including the goals and limitations of the discipline, a brief discussion of the computational methods, and a survey of applications organized chronologically from the earliest migrations of Homo sapiens to the origins of parliamentary democracies in the 19th century.

The remaining 13 chapters present more highly focused investigations limited to specific time periods and regions. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of alternative migration paths out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. The migration of human beings out of Africa could have gone more than one way because of the effects of climate and sea level depth exposing new routes. Two chapters (3 and 4) discuss foraging strategies in hunter-gatherer societies as, first, affected by habitat and, second, in identifying sources of stone for tools and weapons. The next five chapters (5 to 9) are concerned with human movement: the spread of the change from hunter-gatherer economics to fixed agriculture in the Neolithic as a function of either immigration of farming peoples versus a change of culture by education, the development of transportation routes on glacial eskers in Medieval Ireland, the mechanism of language replacement in a culture, general factors affecting the dynamics of human settlement, and changes in human settlement in wetlands. Chapters 10 and 11 are complementary studies of the same cultural transition--Jomon to Yayoi in Japan--including both cultural dynamics (change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture) and the effects of genetic change in the population due to the immigration of new settlers. Chapters 12 and 13 present two studies of cultural and community growth and collapse in two regions widely separated geographically--a small region in Bohemia and the large kingdom of Great Zimbabwe.

The principal modeling technique is agent-based modeling in which there are many, perhaps a few thousand, instances of individuals (or, perhaps, small groups) who have a set of properties, including behaviors, needs, motivations, and personality traits, that allow them to cohere in groups that can take actions under a stimulus or else disassociate themselves to form new coalitions. Depending on the complexity of their programming, their behavior can become more varied and nuanced and they can participate in the simulation as quasi-independent actors. The ultimate expression of agent-based modeling is in the last chapter in which agents appear as animated avatars in Second Life or in the Unity3D game engine. The avatars are fewer in number, but are individualized by using a “genetic code” that includes physical traits from parents and characteristics representing personality and temperament that determine character. It is surprising to see a still photo from the animation showing one avatar assaulting another to steal his food. The avatars are programmed to choose to work or to steal when they are hungry based on their character “genes.” Two societies were modeled in this manner--the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in 3000 BCE (before common era) and the Australian Aboriginal Darag tribe before European settlement. Short videos of the avatars in both societies were produced.

In this book I discovered a new area of computational science. I was completely unfamiliar with the power and sophistication of simulations in social science and the extent to which computation can provide support for archaeology and historical studies. When I read the long first chapter, several lateral trains of thought popped into my mind ranging from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels featuring Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, the 1972 Club of Rome report Limits to growth, and questions arising in the philosophy of history. How much is the evolution of contemporary society determined by inexorable factors beyond anyone’s control? This is a good book because it raises questions.