A Tale of Two Villages: How Food Exchange Led to Aggregation in the American Southwest

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In this talk I use computer simulation to explore the extent to which food-sharing practices would have been instrumental for the survival of Ancestral Pueblo people across the patchy landscape of the Prehispanic American Southwest. Social networks would have created stable bonds among these exchanging individuals, further helping the survival of those individuals and their progeny. Specifically, I engage Sahlins’s notion of balanced reciprocal exchange networks (BRN; when unrelated individuals rely upon reputation building to inform exchange relationships) within the experimental test-bed of the Village Ecodynamics Project’s agent-based simulation.

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I completed a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge in 2007. I then worked in commercial archaeology before beginning a masters in Archaeological Computing at the University of Southampton in 2010. I am now undertaking a PhD with the ACRG focussing on the visualisation and analysis of medieval Cairo, with particular emphasis on simulating movement, visibility and acoustics. My research interests include procedural modelling, visualisation of ancient cities, the visualisation of uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions, medieval and Roman urbanism, the archaeology of early Christianity and Islam.

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