Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HUGASEA (Modelling and simulating Hunter-Gatherer Seafaring in the Americas: ecology, society and watercraft technology in cold aquatic environments)
Reporting period: 2022-10-10 to 2024-10-09
The study of coastal or riverine societies has a long history in anthropology and archaeology. However, one of the major problems archaeologists have yet to address realistically is the development of watercraft, not just as a technical innovation, but also its social implications. Indeed, studying the past without including watercraft technology would be like studying the present without automobiles. This is becoming a critical issue, as emerging archaeological data is pushing back the development of watercraft into the Late Pleistocene and Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer seafaring is becoming a focal point of the discussion on earlier coastal and insular colonization. Regardless of time period, attempting to reconstruct past aquatic mobility presents major challenges. A key issue is the scarcity of direct archaeological evidence on watercraft technology. Yet, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective there are still multiple lines of data and unexplored innovative methodologies to apply to seafaring research. Thus, while many works have evaluated maritime routes with a wide range of computational methods (three recent examples are Slayton 2018; Smith 2020; Fauvelle and Montenegro 2024), the integration of boats in the economics and everyday life of past seafaring Hunter-Gatherer peoples has yet to be fully explored (see Ames 2002).
The HUGASEA project aims to address these questions by studying the interplay between watercraft, environment and social strategies on the Northwest Coast of North America and the Fuego-Patagonian coast of Southern South America. For this, a combination of new and traditional methods will be applied, including the analysis of ethnohistoric and archaeological data, GIS-based methods, and Agent-based modelling (ABM) to simulate and test hypotheses about past seafaring (Figure 1). The application of GIS data into Agent-based modelling (ABM) proposed by HUGASEA is an innovative research method in archaeology (Davies et al. 2019) that can greatly contribute to discuss this type of questions. Four research objectives have been identified:
Objective 1: Integrate modern ecological data of the study areas into GIS-based models and reconstruct the archaeological settlement patterns of selected seafaring HFG societies.
Objective 2: Develop a seafaring HFG Agent-based Model (ABM) within GIS-based environments.
Objective 3: Explore the parametric space of the simulation, and design experiments to validate the model.
Objective 4: Predict spatial patterns of aquatic HFG, and analyse the interplay between environment, watercraft technology and social strategies.
Overall, HUGASEA results will help to understand how Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer used, understood and produced landscapes and seascapes, and how watercraft was integrated into production and everyday life on the NWC and the FPC. Furthermore, this research is expected to produce both a specific testing platform and spatial predictions that could be later applied to study past human-aquatic environment interaction. This is key to understanding new evidence along the Pacific coastlines of North and South America and bringing new perspectives to the peopling of the Americas debate.
References:
Ames, Kenneth M., 2002. Going by Boat: The Forage-Collector Continuum at Sea. In Fitzhugh B., Habu J. (Eds.) Beyond Foraging and Collecting. Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. Boston, MA, Springer: 19–52.
Davies, B., Romanowska, I., Harris, K., Crabtree, S.A. 2019. Combining Geographic Information Systems and Agent-Based Models in Archaeology: Part 2 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, 185–193.
Fauvelle, Mikael, and Alvaro Montenegro. 2024. Do Stormy Seas Lead to Better Boats? Exploring the Origins of the Southern Californian Plank Canoe Through Ocean Voyage Modeling. Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology.
Slayton, Emma Ruth. 2018. Seascape corridors : modeling routes to connect communities across the Caribbean Sea. Sidestone Press, Leiden.
Smith, Karl. 2020. Modelling Seafaring in Iron Age Atlantic Europe. PhD dissertation, Kellogg College, Oxford University, Oxford.
The HUGASEA project aims to address these questions by studying the interplay between watercraft, environment and social strategies on the Northwest Coast of North America and the Fuego-Patagonian coast of Southern South America. For this, a combination of new and traditional methods will be applied, including the analysis of ethnohistoric and archaeological data, GIS-based methods, and Agent-based modelling (ABM) to simulate and test hypotheses about past seafaring (Figure 1). The application of GIS data into Agent-based modelling (ABM) proposed by HUGASEA is an innovative research method in archaeology (Davies et al. 2019) that can greatly contribute to discuss this type of questions. Four research objectives have been identified:
Objective 1: Integrate modern ecological data of the study areas into GIS-based models and reconstruct the archaeological settlement patterns of selected seafaring HFG societies.
Objective 2: Develop a seafaring HFG Agent-based Model (ABM) within GIS-based environments.
Objective 3: Explore the parametric space of the simulation, and design experiments to validate the model.
Objective 4: Predict spatial patterns of aquatic HFG, and analyse the interplay between environment, watercraft technology and social strategies.
Overall, HUGASEA results will help to understand how Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer used, understood and produced landscapes and seascapes, and how watercraft was integrated into production and everyday life on the NWC and the FPC. Furthermore, this research is expected to produce both a specific testing platform and spatial predictions that could be later applied to study past human-aquatic environment interaction. This is key to understanding new evidence along the Pacific coastlines of North and South America and bringing new perspectives to the peopling of the Americas debate.
References:
Ames, Kenneth M., 2002. Going by Boat: The Forage-Collector Continuum at Sea. In Fitzhugh B., Habu J. (Eds.) Beyond Foraging and Collecting. Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. Boston, MA, Springer: 19–52.
Davies, B., Romanowska, I., Harris, K., Crabtree, S.A. 2019. Combining Geographic Information Systems and Agent-Based Models in Archaeology: Part 2 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, 185–193.
Fauvelle, Mikael, and Alvaro Montenegro. 2024. Do Stormy Seas Lead to Better Boats? Exploring the Origins of the Southern Californian Plank Canoe Through Ocean Voyage Modeling. Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology.
Slayton, Emma Ruth. 2018. Seascape corridors : modeling routes to connect communities across the Caribbean Sea. Sidestone Press, Leiden.
Smith, Karl. 2020. Modelling Seafaring in Iron Age Atlantic Europe. PhD dissertation, Kellogg College, Oxford University, Oxford.
The achievement of objective 1 has involved the development of the following activites:
- Collection and integration of ecological (currents and winds) and geomorphological data from multiple and diverse sources covering the two main areas of the project, the Northwest Coast of North America (NWC) and the Fuego-Patagonia coast of Southernmost South America (FPC).
- Revision and discussion of the anthropological and archaeological literature from the Northwest Coast of North American (NWC), with special attention to works focused on social networks, social space, landscapes and indigenous conceptions of space and time.
- Collection of NWC archaeological data and creation of an archaeological spatial database using ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro with more than 5,000 archaeological features. A subset of ca. 2,691 archaeological sites was selected corresponding to archaeological sites or shell middens and located within 1-km of the current coastline. On the other hand, access to the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) allowed to complement the project’s archaeological database with 2,347 radiocarbon dates corresponding to 543 archaeological sites.
- Collection of Fuego-Patagonian archaeological data and creation of a spatial database. The data of the Georeferenced Catalogue of Archaeological Sites of the Magallanes Region, available to the researcher, was complemented with the archaeological sites and radiocarbon dates of the region of Aysen and Los Lagos (Chile) and the north shore of the Beagle Channel (Argentina).
- Integration of the archaeological data and environmental data into GIS. Data was processed and integrated with GIS-based methods to model and analyse the seascape and the local environment of the study areas.
The achievement of Objective 2 has involved three main research activities:
- Analysis of the historical and ethnographic data concerning the seafaring societies from the study areas. This involved the analysis of literature and works about indigenous seafaring, watercraft and wood technology; ethnohistorical manuscripts, notes and photographs available through digital collections and in person visits to museum and archives; as well as formal and informal exchanges of knowledge with traditional dugout carvers.
- Multi-disciplinary study of historical native canoes held in museum collections. Three-dimensional models of the crafts were made with photogrammetry. Then, digital models were integrated into CFD software to analyse their hydrodynamic properties. Results will be integrated into the agent-based model.
- Design and elaboration of an Agent-based model to simulate and compute navigation routes. The HUGASEA model is a computational model implemented in NetLogo 6.4.0 (Wilensky 1999) that simulates the movement of agents paddling a canoe across a geosimulated environment. The objective of the model is to identify the most recurrent maritime routes between one or multiple source(s) and destination(s), evaluating the degree of connectivity between given locations in terms of navigation time and/or risk. The HUGASEA model is currently functional but still on evaluation. During the second part of the project, model functionality will be measured with Sensitivity Analysis and Machine Learning methods (Objective 3).
- Collection and integration of ecological (currents and winds) and geomorphological data from multiple and diverse sources covering the two main areas of the project, the Northwest Coast of North America (NWC) and the Fuego-Patagonia coast of Southernmost South America (FPC).
- Revision and discussion of the anthropological and archaeological literature from the Northwest Coast of North American (NWC), with special attention to works focused on social networks, social space, landscapes and indigenous conceptions of space and time.
- Collection of NWC archaeological data and creation of an archaeological spatial database using ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro with more than 5,000 archaeological features. A subset of ca. 2,691 archaeological sites was selected corresponding to archaeological sites or shell middens and located within 1-km of the current coastline. On the other hand, access to the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) allowed to complement the project’s archaeological database with 2,347 radiocarbon dates corresponding to 543 archaeological sites.
- Collection of Fuego-Patagonian archaeological data and creation of a spatial database. The data of the Georeferenced Catalogue of Archaeological Sites of the Magallanes Region, available to the researcher, was complemented with the archaeological sites and radiocarbon dates of the region of Aysen and Los Lagos (Chile) and the north shore of the Beagle Channel (Argentina).
- Integration of the archaeological data and environmental data into GIS. Data was processed and integrated with GIS-based methods to model and analyse the seascape and the local environment of the study areas.
The achievement of Objective 2 has involved three main research activities:
- Analysis of the historical and ethnographic data concerning the seafaring societies from the study areas. This involved the analysis of literature and works about indigenous seafaring, watercraft and wood technology; ethnohistorical manuscripts, notes and photographs available through digital collections and in person visits to museum and archives; as well as formal and informal exchanges of knowledge with traditional dugout carvers.
- Multi-disciplinary study of historical native canoes held in museum collections. Three-dimensional models of the crafts were made with photogrammetry. Then, digital models were integrated into CFD software to analyse their hydrodynamic properties. Results will be integrated into the agent-based model.
- Design and elaboration of an Agent-based model to simulate and compute navigation routes. The HUGASEA model is a computational model implemented in NetLogo 6.4.0 (Wilensky 1999) that simulates the movement of agents paddling a canoe across a geosimulated environment. The objective of the model is to identify the most recurrent maritime routes between one or multiple source(s) and destination(s), evaluating the degree of connectivity between given locations in terms of navigation time and/or risk. The HUGASEA model is currently functional but still on evaluation. During the second part of the project, model functionality will be measured with Sensitivity Analysis and Machine Learning methods (Objective 3).
The overall goal of the HUGASEA project aims to address the determining factors in organizational and seafaring strategies of aquatic Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers (HFG) on the Northwest Coast of North America and the Fuego-Patagonia coast of South America by integrating ethnography, historical data, archaeological and computational approaches (GIS-based ABM, SA and Machine Learning). Past societies embody the prototypes and roots of climate and environmental-related challenges, providing long-term perspectives on them. Furthermore, digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are critical enablers for attaining the goals of the European Green Deal. Thus, the project contributes to the scientific impact, addressing EU’s digital and green ambition by 2030, and faces current global challenges firmly aligned with the political priorities of the European Commission and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The main methodological innovation in this project should be designing a specific testing platform able to validate historical hypotheses in seafaring contexts by simulating maritime/aquatic movement and generating specific archaeological predictions (Objective 4). The expected outcomes of the model will provide new insights into the complex human-aquatic environment interaction at a regional scale. On completion of the project, the generated models will be available to the scientific community for their application to the American and European prehistoric record.
The main methodological innovation in this project should be designing a specific testing platform able to validate historical hypotheses in seafaring contexts by simulating maritime/aquatic movement and generating specific archaeological predictions (Objective 4). The expected outcomes of the model will provide new insights into the complex human-aquatic environment interaction at a regional scale. On completion of the project, the generated models will be available to the scientific community for their application to the American and European prehistoric record.