Bova Marina Archaeological Project - Department of Archaeology

each site to the different environmental zones
defined earlier.
Combining yield and accessibility values,
three kinds of dynamic simulations were run on a
fixed population-size (50 people) for purposes of
simplicity. Each simulation can be considered as a
sequence of events. The first simulation shows how
far people need to travel before reaching enough
land for their particular economies. The assessment
of the size of land needed per population and
economy was based on literature, especially the
work of Susan Gregg (Gregg 1988). The value of
specific land use and its land size desired will
depend on the economy used. Farmland will be
more important in the horticulturalist and mixed
farming-foraging economies than in the pastoralist
and forager ones. For foraging a larger territory is
required, although it does not have the same impact
on the land. For herding, a slightly larger terrain
will also be necessary as animal husbandry is more
mobile than farming. This will have an effect on
the time and distance needed to cover to achieve
the suitable land size for the amount of people
concerned.
A second kind of simulation is
vegetational growth. One starts from a set of empty
maps, which all grow a particular kind of
vegetation during a fixed time period. After the
vegetation has iterated for a particular amount of
time, the simulation stops and assumptions can be
made about when a vegetation type reaches its
climax state as each type grows at its own rate. It
was assumed that wet plants will grow faster than
plants on heavy soil, depending on the soil texture,
temperature and precipitation. Beach vegetation is
conditioned to withstand a lot of extreme climatic
and edaphic conditions and will grow at an average
rate. Varied plants were given a rate of growth in
between the other types of vegetation.
For the purpose of simplicity, both
previous simulations were combined. First, the
natural vegetation grows for a fixed amount of
years until it is mature enough to let people use it
for their specific purposes. Humans then use the
land for farming, herding or foraging for a certain
period, after which these are abandoned and the
natural vegetation can grow back slowly. Because
of the different impacts that foraging, farming and
herding can have on the environment, different
parameters were used in the regeneration of the
vegetation. This is because land that has been used
for herding and agriculture is a lot more degraded
than when it was used for foraging and it will take
longer for natural vegetation to grow back. Huntergatherers
tend not to exhaust their environments in
order to reserve the possibility of returning to them
after several seasons. The result is a total of 36
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Bova Marina Archaeological Project 1999
maps, defining land use per site, economy and
specific type of impact on the environment. Some
examples are displayed as Figure 5.
When simulating these land use maps,
some basic assumptions were used, which applied
to the yield and accessibility. For people to use a
particular landscape zone, the yield has to be
sufficiently high in order to be selected. In
addition, it is assumed that foraging people will
travel further than those herding and farming.
Therefore the cost assumptions are different per
specific land use. This will influence the land use
maps and is interesting in comparative studies. It
was also moderately based upon literature about
site catchment analysis (Higgs and Vita-Finzi 1972:
27-36; Jarman, Bailey and Jarman 1982: 26-46).
The analysis thus resulted in maps
illustrating anthropogenic environmental impact
and potential spatial dimensions of the cultural
world that humans lived in. These results have two
basic implications. One is economic and ecological:
human landscape use and environmental impact can
be examined in a systematic way, in contrast to
isolated single site-based studies. The second is
cultural: humans use the landscape, including ‘offsite’
areas for many other non-economic uses.
Many of these uses are conditioned by the existent
human use of those areas.
In this regard, it is interesting to observe
that sites are preferably ecotonally located,
enabling the exploitation of two or even three
resource zones: cultivation on a plateau, some
pasture for grazing and a possibility for hunting and
gathering in wooded alluvial margins.
The primary result of the GIS study to date
is to underline the importance of non-farming land
uses for site distribution. Instead of the commonly
held view that competition for farmland was of
greatest importance in farming societies, the
simulation showed that even in these, human
interaction was probably structured by non-farming
uses such as the needs of foraging and pasture. The
sizes of the different specific land uses such as for
foraging, mixed foraging-farming, farming and
herding show a different picture. In the region
under consideration, farmland is stretched out in
small patches around the sites, while foraging and
herding zones are continuous and large. Neolithic
groups were probably more mobile, using bigger
territories and moving frequently within them, than
is usually assumed (e.g. (Higgs and Vita-Finzi
1972). This means that the distribution of sites,
even in mountainous areas like Calabria, should
not be limited to available farmland. Observing the
contacts between the areas of human impact
associated with different sites enables inference of
possible elements of South Italian social and