AN AGENT BASED EMPIRICAL MODEL OF COLLECTIVE SEASONAL HUNTING
Florencia Del Castillo
Abstract This work presents an ethnoarchaeological model of collective seasonal hunting to track the interactions among hunters and guanacos-prey (one of the most abundant and ecologically important mammal species of patagonian steppe) in a well known ethnohistorical scenario of patagonia hinterland. The conceptual model was developed based on ethnographical and historical data from an indigenous society from North Patagonia. We model a place of guanaco hunting named Yamnagoo by the ethnic group gününa këna during XIX century. The data used to design this complex space of hunting, come in part from the description made by european explorers from the XIX century and from ethnographic descriptions of one of the most uninhabited region of South America.
The model was develop to address the interactions between collective hunting organization and the guanaco's capacity to respond and react to it. Therefore, we design a model with collective hunting strategies based on search, stalk, chase, food processing, consume, and prey discard. With the model we experiment with a large number of hunting attacks to quantify how the environmental variables, geographical constrains and comunication between hunters, affect density, speed and motion of hunter-agents and guanaco-agents. The aim of the model is analyse and explore how cooperation activities and the rol of information transfer in hunting interactions works and how ethnoarchaeological data can be usefull to understand social Dynamics in prehistroy. The model is validated by comparing the simulation results with archaeological fieldwork and survey.
