Food for all: An agent-based model to explore the emergence and implications of cooperation for food storage

Production risk, inter-annual food storage by households and population-level consequences in seasonal prehistoric agrarian societies

“…In effect, households do not have the contingent possibility of adjusting their agricultural strategy as a function of their current state, specifically, their current food stores. We do not consider the social dilemmas of household contributions to cooperative or pooling storage (Angourakis et al 2014), nor do we attempt here to include in our model important relationships among surplus, storage, socio-economic practices, the distribution of political power or moral understandings of property (Hendon 2000). We are confident that most of these assumptions will not affect the structural results we describe.…”

“…Simple models are essential aids in this effort (see also Angourakis et al 2014;Tushingham and Bettinger 2013). We also seek to demonstrate the importance of combining different types and scales of modelling by focusing on the complementary insights available from behavioural ecology and population ecology, and from analytical and simulation methods.…”

“…Storage is prominent in diverse theories about the shift from hunting-gathering to food production, plant and animal domestication, sedentism, and the origins of social stratification and political centralisation (Angourakis et al 2014;Earle and D'Altroy 1982;McCorriston and Hole 1991;Wesson 1999). Two reasons appear to be primary: storage is associated with the production of surplus and it commonly is archaeologically visible and measureable.…”

Resilience of small-scale societies: a view from drylands

“…In such areas, unlike regions characterized by a steady climate ensuring year-round yields, delayed food consumption becomes fundamental to lower vulnerability and increase resilience. In the context of small-scale societies and early agricultural systems, the boundary between subsistence storage and surplus storage has been assessed to be the amount of foodstuff needed to cover three consecutive years with scarce harvests (Angourakis et al 2015). Past those limits, storage can no longer be considered as a mere risk-reduction strategy, but rather a wealth-accumulation strategy, as emerging from the study of the evolution of Neolithic food storage in the Near East and in Europe (Kuijt 2015, O'Brien and Bentley 2015, Winterhalder et al 2015.…”

“…This adaptive strategy was intertwined with domestication in drylands in Southwest Asia (Near East) in the early Holocene, where storage of wild cereal grains is attested in Dhra' as early as 11 ka BP (Kuijt andFinlayson 2009, Kuijt 2015). In fact, agent-based models suggest that the agricultural lifestyle all together would hardly have been viable without the development of consistent and systematic storage practices and technologies (Angourakis et al 2015). Finally, as production and storage capabilities increased above subsistence needs, the accumulation of surplus may have contributed in some measure to some of the major challenges inherited by contemporary societies, predominantly characterized by market-oriented farming: (1) the exponential spread of agricultural systems and related environmental transformations; (2) the transition to less cohesive societies, prompted in part by the accumulation of surplus (De Saulieu and Testart 2015); and (3) the progressive decoupling, in terms of perceived dependency between agricultural production and climate variability.…”