Tainter

Network model of simple societies inspired by Joseph Tainter's theory of the collapse of complex societies.

Tainter, J. A. (1988).The collapse of complex societies.
New studies in archaeology. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press

installation

Obtain the code and change into directory

git clone [email protected]:flo-schu/tainter
cd tainter

Create environment, activate it and install model package. the [datalad] option installs the datalad packages which are necessary to download the dataset.

conda create -n tainter
conda activate tainter
conda install python=3.9
pip install -e .[datalad] 

Install the pre-simulated dataset from the open-science foundation (osf.io) into the folder_publication data

datalad clone https://osf.io/u897c/ publication_data

You should be done. All anylses from the paper can be conducted by executing the jupyter notebook scripts/analysis.ipynb

jupyter lab scripts/analysis.ipynb

Model

The model is an agent-based network model written in Python. The main files are included under scripts/model.

Instructions

to execute the model code, navigate (cd) into scripts directory. From here all scripts in the main directory can be executed.

Prefixes correspond to figures displayed in the publication

The files macroscopic_approximation.py and stochastic_model.py are very basic scripts which execute the main modules of the code.

data for f4 was generated on a high perfomance cluster. The necessary files for this computation are found under scripts/cluster. These files need to be slightly adapted to suit file structure. Simulations can be carried out on a normal computer if the resolution of parameters is reduced.

Analyses

Several analyses can be performed with the model code.

• stochastic simulations of the network with various paramter settings. For details on parameters see the inline documentation in model/main.py

• analytic calculations with equations derived in publication

• several plots to illustrate the results in publication