From *simple* systems to *complex* -- the revolution in methods and models
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From Monday I had readings on complexity on A289
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They are 2pp sections of the Roadmap for complex systems, Nth draft, extremely interesting readings. Tomorrow's afternoon speaker is Cosma Shalizi discussing methods for complexity analysis. Are these relevant to anthro/archaeo?
I added some new wiki site readings just below - relevant indeed! Laurent and I worked with Cosma for our article on historical dynamics measured through scaling of city size distributions per century (10 centuries) in Europe, China, etc. Amazing results.
Now the method we developed from Constantino Tsallis's work is on the web (one wiki reading)
Celia gave me here site size datasets for Uruk etc, partly from Algaze. The amazing thing I discovered today in scaling these data is that the same q-exponential that Laurent presented last time and that we used for historical dynamics works for site-size scaling. The approach seems to be revolutionary for the type of inferences that can be drawn from archaeological data.
Another new wikisite reading is also revolutionary for cohesive group detection in network analysis.
If you can read the complexity 2pp bits and attend Cosma's talk tomorrow afternoon there are lots of useful things to learn from complexity. We anthropologists/archaeologists have been using methods for *simple* systems when in fact we are studying *complex systems*.
