Simulating the Past for Understanding the Present. A Critical Review

Abstract

This introductory essay aims to introduce the chapters in the book presenting some aspects of the theoretical and conceptual framework necessary to consider the advantages computer simulation techniques and technologies offer to historical disciplines, but also quoting from the hundreds of examples in current scientific literature to give a context within which the individual contributions can be understood better. We argue that historical simulations should be much more than vivid illustrations of what scholars believe in the present existed in the past. A simulation is basically the computer representation of a “mechanism”, representing how social intentions, goals and behaviors were causally connected in the past. This can be done by formulating a “generative model”, that is, a model of a set of mechanisms. In this chapter, it is suggested that computer simulation may act as a Virtual Laboratory to help studying how human societies have experimented relevant transformations and in which way the consequences of those transformations in technology, activities, behavior, organization or knowledge were transmitted to other social agents or groups of social agents. Building artificial societies inside a computer allows us to understand that social reality is not capricious. It has been produced somehow, although not always the same cause produces the same effect, because social actions are not performed in isolation, but in complex and dialectical frameworks, which favor, prevent, or modify the capacity, propensity, or tendency the action has to produce or to determine a concrete effect. This way of studying social dynamics in the past by means of computer simulations is beginning to abandon its infancy. Archaeologists and historians have started to convert social theories in computer programs trying to simulate social process and experiment with different explanations about known archaeological societies. Our book is just one additional example of a current trend among archaeologists and historians: historical events occurred only once and many years ago but within a computer surrogates of those events can be artificially repeated here and now for understanding how and why they happened.