Books

Books : reviews

Timothy A. Kohler, George J. Gumerman.
Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: agent-based modeling of social and spatial processes.
OUP. 2000

Recent developments in modeling societies have allowed researchers the freedom to move from the more traditional analytical techniques to an actor-centered, evolutionary, and generative understanding of how social phenomena emerge and work through time. Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies presents agent-based modeling studies from archaeologists, ethnologists, sociologists, philosophers. and primatologists that examine these social and spatial dynamics without ignoring their complexity or compromising replicability. With an emphasis on small-scale societies in an effort to maximize realism in the modeling efforts applied to social evolution, this volume is an important step toward an actor-oriented, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding human behavior over time.