Agent-based Modeling for the Bronze Age Salt Mine of Hallstatt (Upper Austria)
Kerstin Kowarik, Hans Reschreiter, Gabriel Wurzer, Ralf Totschnig · 2008
The existing archeological model of the Bronze Age salt mines in Hallstatt (Upper Austria) leaves some important questions open: What was the size of the mining area, how long did mining activities proceed, what was the amount of mined salt, how big was the size of the mining community. This is regrettable, since answers to these questions would provide important insights into the economic and social history of prehistoric Europe. By using agent-based modeling (ABM), we have translated the body of theories conceptualizing the mining complex into a simulation. As a matter of fact, we could check the consistency of the existing archeological knowledge and obtain answers to the aforementioned questions using computation. We are convinced that our solution can be taken as powerful tool for the analysis of complex production as well as for explorative computation of working processes.