Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011) 1583e1590

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Journal of Archaeological Science

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Specialization and social inequality in Bronze Age SE Arabia: analyzing the development of production strategies and economic networks using agent-based modeling
Lynne M. Rouse a, *, Lloyd Weeks b
a b

Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA Department of Archaeology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 12 November 2010 Received in revised form 17 February 2011 Accepted 18 February 2011 Keywords: Production specialization Wealth inequality Agent-based modeling Socio-economic networks Bronze Age South-eastern Arabia

a b s t r a c t
This paper investigates the role of specialized production strategies in the development of socioeconomic inequalities in Bronze Age south-eastern (SE) Arabia, and particularly, the ways in which a localized, internal exchange economy may have produced stress and instability in the SE Arabian socio-economic system. While archaeological research has established that the communities of SE Arabia participated in a widespread Bronze Age exchange system that included areas of the ancient Near East, South Asia, and Central Asia, it is unclear to what degree this interaction fostered the broad-scale socioeconomic changes seen in the Early Bronze Age of SE Arabia. Here we present the results of an agent-based model that suggest the nature of the internal exchange economy in SE Arabia itself may have precipitated the social conditions necessary for change by allowing individuals to prot disproportionately. We thus emphasize the importance of local production strategies in generating socioeconomic change, in addition to the well-established economic and cultural contacts with the wider Bronze Age world. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: evaluating internal and external factors in the rise of social complexity in Bronze Age SE Arabia Many studies of the Bronze Age societies of the Persian Gulf region have emphasized broad scale political and economic processes in the explanation of local culture change. For example, Crawford (1996, 1998), Laursen (2009) and Hjlund (2007) have highlighted the effects of variations in the scale and structure of long-distance Bronze Age exchange in the greater Persian Gulf region on socio-economic developments in Dilmun (Bahrain island and the adjacent coast of Saudi Arabia) and neighboring lands. Others have modeled the societies of the Persian Gulf region as peripheries to a Bronze Age economic world system centered on Mesopotamia (Edens, 1992; Edens and Kohl, 1993). For SE Arabia, the signicance archaeologists have placed on participation in the Persian Gulf exchange system is neither surprising nor unjustied. During the Hat period (c. 3100e2700 BC) and particularly during the Umm an-Nar period (c. 2700e2000

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: lmrouse@wustl.edu (L.M. Rouse). 0305-4403/$ e see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.023

BC), communities in SE Arabia were inextricably tied to the wider Bronze Age world (Fig. 1). Demand from the urban centers of Mesopotamia, the Indus, Bahrain and Iran for the products of SE Arabia (most notably copper but also a range of stones, woods, marine products and nished artifacts; e.g. Glassner, 1989: pp. 187e189; Cleuziou and Tosi, 2007: pp. 186e187) inuenced production systems in SE Arabia, whilst a variety of foreign luxuries and staples (textiles, grain, pottery, precious and base metals, semi precious stones, ivory, etc.) penetrated and no doubt partly contoured all corners of the SE Arabian economy. Alongside these material exchanges, direct contacts between SE Arabians and their urban counterparts would also have provided a critical mechanism for the transmission of knowledge and ideas. However, more recent studies have emphasized the unique nature of local economic and subsistence adaptations and social structures in Bronze Age SE Arabia (e.g. Al-Jahwari, 2009; Cleuziou and Tosi, 2007) and it is clear that a proper understanding of cultural development in the region must also consider the role of internal production and exchange systems in the generation of inequality. Weeks (2003: p. 52) following Shennan (1999) has previously presented models of production based on Ricardian economic principles, particularly that of comparative advantage (see below), to discuss internal production and exchange systems

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Fig. 1. Map of SE Arabia as area of interest and neighboring regions. Modern names are shown in black, with ancient names (from Bronze Age Mesopotamian historical sources) shown in white italics.

in Bronze Age SE Arabia. That study suggested that local variations in the scale and nature of production in Bronze Age SE Arabia had the potential to increase socio-economic inequality rather than mitigate it. In this paper, we take this investigation further by using an agent-based model operating on Ricardian principles to investigate the role of specialization in the rise of inequality. This model incorporates approximations to economic situations that can be recognized in Bronze Age SE Arabia, and provides insights into the ways in which internal economic specialization and specic production systems could have been managed by individuals (and groups) to advance their wealth and status at the expense of others. The use of agent-based modeling to enhance archaeological understanding is not new (see, Bentley et al., 2005; Graham, 2006; Grifn and Stanish, 2007; Kohler et al., 1996; Low et al., 2005), but its application towards understanding the interplay of specialization and wealth inequality and the effect on socio-economic networks presents a new approach in the study of Bronze Age SE Arabia. 2. Archaeological context 2.1. Social complexity and Bronze Age SE Arabias exchange economy With few exceptions, archaeologists have characterized the communities of Bronze Age SE Arabia as approaching e but never achieving e state-level complexity (Cleuziou, 2003: p. 140; Crawford, 1998: p. 149; Potts, 2008; Tosi, 1989: p. 157). Rather, the surviving archaeological and textual evidence has generally been interpreted as attesting a decentralized political structure (e.g. Potts, 2008). This fact sets the societies of Bronze Age SE

Arabia apart from their urbanized and deeply socio-politically stratied contemporaries in Bahrain, Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus. It has been argued that the development of social complexity in SE Arabia followed a fundamentally different trajectory than seen in neighboring areas of ancient SW Asia, incorporating social formations that were the progenitors of the later Arabian tribal system (Cleuziou, 2002, 2003: p. 226, 140 and 145). In essence, it is suggested that Bronze Age societies in SE Arabia adhered to a tribal ethos that conferred very limited powers of coercion upon tribal rulers, curtailed individual efforts towards economic accumulation, and did not support the development of redistributive or tributary economies that underpinned complex political structures in neighboring regions (Cleuziou, 1998, 2002, 2003; Cleuziou and Tosi, 2000, 2007: pp. 95e96; Tosi, 1986: p. 480; cf. Lancaster and Lancaster, 1992). Whilst Cleuziou and Tosi regard the putative tribal structure of Umm an-Nar period society in SE Arabia as a fundamental factor in the regions development, they also postulate an additional critical factor in the unique trajectory of Bronze Age Arabian society: the formation of an internal exchange economy (Cleuziou and Tosi, 2007: p. 66, 168). This exchange economy developed due to the mosaic distribution of resources in the region that necessitated the exchange of the products (e.g. copper, pottery, soft-stone, agricultural goods, marine resources, etc.) of regionally specialized production groups in order to maintain a stable subsistence base. In the marginal environments that characterized much of Bronze Age SE Arabia, it is argued that the only viable adaptive strategy was economic inter-dependence (Cleuziou and Tosi, 2000: p. 26). In the absence of the political integration of the region and of elitecontrolled redistributive exchange mechanisms, the exchange economy acted to facilitate economic and cultural integration across 3rd millennium SE Arabia.

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2.2. Ricardian principles, comparative advantage, and SE Arabian networks Under the economic premise of comparative advantage, emphasis is placed on exchange value relative to production, rather than direct economic benet (Ricardo, 1817). Comparative advantage follows the basic notion that if an item can be obtained through trade for less than the cost of producing it oneself, it is better to trade for that item and spend labor time on other tasks. Another important feature of comparative advantage is the disassociation of ubiquitous benet from equal benet, so that selfguided action may produce more gains for some than others, and, as discussed elsewhere (Shennan, 1999), may even result in economic loss at times. All of these principles of comparative advantage rest on the premise that groups or individuals participate in the system because of a perceived socio-cultural or economic necessity, which outweighs the benet of total economic self-sufciency. Such assumptions are consistent with the notion of the exchange economy and tribal ethos of Bronze Age SE Arabia discussed above, which values loyalties and alliances and where participants continue to participate even in the face of hardships because of a perceived social necessity in doing so. 2.3. Specialization, complexity, and agent-based approaches Specialized production is a fundamental component of the exchange economy model developed to explain aspects of cultural change in Early Bronze Age SE Arabia. Archaeologically, we might recognize the variation in absolute scale of copper smelting residues (Weeks, 2003:pp. 45e53), or the differing distribution patterns of Umm an-Nar common ceramic wares (produced and used widely on local scales) and ne wares (produced in a small number of locations and distributed across the region) (Cleuziou and Mry, 2002; Mry, 2000) as evidence for co-existence of productive strategies with very different degrees of specialization. However, it can often be difcult in archaeological research to link small-scale observations with broader-scale patterns, or vice versa. The archaeological studies alone can be limited in their ability to recognize how large-scale patterns such as these were precipitated or affected by actions on a very small scale. Agent-based modeling, as a complimentary research tool to archaeology, allows researchers to explore the hypothesized links of cause and effect between various scales. Like all models, agent-based models are simplications of the real world. Signicantly, though, agents in agent-based models may choose to alter their interactive behavior given their understanding of the system around them, and it is these individual actions, through a series of iterated time steps, that precipitate change in the system as a whole. While agents are limited in their range of behavioral choices by the programming (as, it could be argued, people are limited in their choices by cultural norms), the autonomy of agent choice is what allows agent-based modeling to generate behavior rather than impose it. The accumulation of individual agent behavior alters the structure of the interactive network through time, and reveals how multiple independent choices are linked to the emergence of global, system-wide trends. The model presented here is not intended to establish the link between specialized production and socio-economic complexity, for that connection is already widely recognized in archaeological (and non-archaeological) literature (Adams, 2005; Boone, 1992; Joffe, 1991; Levy, 1983; Stanish, 2004). Rather, the goal is to develop previous observations and guide current understanding as to how seemingly diverse production strategies in distinct technological scenarios all converge in the development of unequal social and economic relationships. This model is particularly relevant to places such as Bronze Age SE Arabia, where localized specialization and

wealth disparity may have contributed to regional developments in socio-economic interaction and complexity. This model explores these intertwined processes in three different techno-cultural environments or scenarios, which can be summarized as (1) an established base of technical knowledge, with production materials and techniques readily available, (2) introduction of a single new product or technology into an established system, thereby creating a niche market, and (3) the ooding of an established system through the introduction of a suite of new products and/or technologies. 3. An agent-based model of specialized production Our model is based upon the so-called JinGirNew model (Jin et al., 2001), which successfully approximates human social networks through a system of nodes (the agents) and edges (lines connecting interacting agents and representing relationships between them). Using a few basic and system-wide rules of interaction, the JinGirNew model accurately simulates many of the properties of real human social networks, such as a tendency for clusters of individuals to form, but with a few cross-network connections that join every agent to every other agent within a few steps (known as the small-world effect, see Bentley, 2003 and Watts and Strogatz, 1998). Adapting the JinGirNew model, we have created a new model that incorporates economic production and exchange, which is unique in the way it examines the economic interactions that take place in socially structured networks. 3.1. Overview of model parameters In the model we present, agents produce and trade three products, labeled A, B, and C. The rate at which each agent produces each product is determined by how much labor time they devote to its production (a value called Effort, which is effectively the agents rate of specialization), and how efcient they are at producing said product (a value called Efciency, which may represent access to raw materials, technical skill, or quality of production equipment). The model runs through a series of iterations, or time steps, and each time step an agent trades products with another agent whom it knows through already-established social connections. The agent will give priority to a protable trade e one where it can trade away a product it can easily produce, and trade for a product that is more costly to produce. There are two important aspects to the exchange relationship. First, though each trading partner may benet, trade may not be equally protable for both, depending on the values of each agents Effort and Efciency rates for each product. Second, agents must trade through one of their social connections, even if it results ultimately in an unprotable exchange. In these scenarios, agents seek to minimize their losses. At the end of each time step, agents evaluate their trade, and adjust their Effort values towards production of the product they understand to be most valuable (their Efciency value for production of each product is xed throughout the model). This arrangement allows an agent to predict a protable course of action for itself, but its adjustment is constrained by local experience and imperfect knowledge of product values within the system as a whole. Key variables and some basic operations of the model are laid out in Tables 1 and 2, while more detailed explanations of model parameters and the programming code can be found online at www.saie.wustl.edu. The parameters of our model follow very generally the Ricardian principles noted in Section 2.2. The necessity of group afnity is approximated by the model operating as a closed system, where the number of participants does not uctuate, only their labor devotion. The model also follows the principle of comparative

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Table 1 The default parameters of the specialized production model. Parameter Agent variables Product (A, B, C) Production effort (A, B, C) Production efciency (A, B, C) Strategy/specialization Wanted trade item Wealth Degree Price Global parameters r0 r1 Y Product cap (A, B, C) Effort cap Efciency cap NumNodes MaxDegree Description Amount of A, B, or C product owned by each agent Value multiplied by production efciency rate to determine an agents production each time step; sum of efforts A, B, and C must equal 1 Value multiplied by production effort rate to determine an agents production each time step; must be whole integers greater than 0 The product that gives the node the greatest return for labor investment; the product with the lowest price The least return for investment product; the opposite of strategy/specialization Sum of three products owned by the agent Number of connections to other nodes The value assigned to each product during trade encounters; based on Effort, Efciency, and Wealth Probability that random agents are connected each time step Used in calculating the probability two agents with mutual connection will meet Probability of a lost connection each time step Maximum amount of product an agent can start with Maximum Effort initially assigned to any Product Maximum Efciency assigned to each product Number of nodes in the model Maximum number of connections allowed per node Default value 0 < Product > 100 0  Effort > 1 0 < Efciency > 10 Variable Variable Wealth > 0 0 < Degree > 5 Variable

0.0005 2 0.005 100 1 10 250 5

advantage through a bartered exchange system, and allows unequal benet for trading partners. The inequality of trading partnerships is an important and intentional feature of the model, because it simulates participation in a socio-economic system enforced by cultural continuity among agents (as discussed by Shennan, 1999, and representative of Cleuziou and Tosis, 2007: p. 168 hypothesized tribal conguration of Early Bronze Age SE Arabia). 3.2. Variation in model modes: approximating scenarios The model operates under three main modes which are designed to approximate past socio-economic systems. The rst or default mode is an established regime of technical knowledge, where the materials and techniques for producing culturally signicant objects are readily available, even if they are only utilized by a few individuals. The results of the default model run were used in order to provide a baseline against which to compare the results of the other two modes. The parameters associated with the default mode can be found in Table 1. In all modes, there was no limit to how much of any product an agent was allowed to accumulate during the course of the model run. The second mode is one where a single new product or technology is introduced into the default system, so that the ability to supply the product is capped by limited supply of workable material and/or restricted knowledge of production techniques, thus creating a niche market. The one-product cap mode allows one product to be regulated at the outset of the model (in this instance Product A, though the same results would have been produced if Products B or C were altered, as there is no inherent difference between the Products as modeled). By limiting the
Table 2 Various calculations employed by agents in the model. Calculation For Production X Price X Formula Effort X$Efciency X 1

availability of one product at the outset, scarcity of this product makes its production a niche market (Bentley et al., 2005), available to those agents able or willing to adjust their production strategy to ll the demand for a rare product. The third mode explored in this model is the inltration of a suite of new products and/or technologies into a default system. Archaeologically, this can be equated to the often abrupt geographical movement and physical convergence of distinct cultural groups, whereby a whole range of new material culture and production practices are suddenly encountered. During two-product cap mode, corresponding to a suite of new technical skills penetrating a production system, the availability of two products was limited at the outset (in this case Product A and Product C), while all other parameters operated at default values (Table 1). Again, the choice of Product Caps A and C was arbitrary, and the model could have been run with any two-product caps varied. By creating scarcity of multiple products, agents were presented with an opportunity to adjust production towards emerging market demand, or remain producers of an already ubiquitous, though not necessarily devalued product. 3.3. The models applicability to Bronze Age SE Arabia While a number of new technologies were established in SE Arabia between c. 3100 and 2500 BC, it is difcult to evaluate whether we should consider this a specic example of a oneproduct or two-product cap mode. As in many regions of the world, limitations in the available archaeological evidence and in chronological resolution result in uncertainties over the timing of the new technological introductions into Early Bronze Age SE Arabia (including oasis agriculture, copper metallurgy, pottery production, baked steatite bead production, etc.), and thus whether such innovations were introduced into the system singly or as suites. Although Cleuziou and Tosi (2007: p. 91) state that by ca. 3100 BC, the Great Transformation was over, there is disagreement about the earliest dates for a number of its components. Oasis agriculture, for example, is suggested to have ourished from the late 4th millennium BC, although archaeological survey data from both interior and coastal regions (Al-Jahwari, 2009: pp. 130e131; Giraud, 2010) would seem to place its origins at the start of the Umm anNar period c. 2700 BC. Indigenous ceramic production, likewise,

Amount to buy

  Product X Effort X $Efficiency X $ Wealth Wealthown PriceX trading partner

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seems not to have begun until the early 3rd millennium BC (Mry, 2000) and, despite the presence of copper-base artifacts in Hat period sites (e.g. Cleuziou and Tosi, 2007: p. 115 and Fig. 101), there is as yet no primary evidence for local copper smelting before the mid-3rd millennium BC (Weeks, 2003). Although uncertainties will persist in making direct links between our model and archaeological observations, we believe the general trends revealed in our modeling are relevant for understanding social complexity in Early Bronze Age SE Arabia. The model can apply to social networks of various scales in SE Arabia (for example, incorporating a wider geographical extent or more localized communities), which may have experienced different scenarios of technological and/or productive change. Thus, attempting to identify the Hat or Umm an-Nar periods as a whole with any of the models modes may be a less fruitful activity than recognizing that these modeled scenarios may have been experienced simultaneously on many different levels throughout Bronze Age SE Arabia. More important are the general trends and convergences revealed in one-product and two-product cap modes, and how these relate to our current archaeological understanding of social developments. 4. Results of the model The results of three distinct model run modes are presented below. These are default mode (where all parameters are set to the defaults presented in Table 1), one-product cap, and two-product cap, chosen for the simulation of different situations of expanding technical knowledge. In every instance, the results presented are based on the average over ten runs of the model to 5000 time steps. Owing to the fact that the model addresses specialization, it is logical to break the results into groups of agents who are either specialists or generalists. Specialists are dened as agents whose production effort is 1 (the highest possible) for one product and 0 for the other two products; similarly, any agent who has a positive production effort for more than one product is considered a generalist, even if their three Efforts break down as 0.999, 0.001, and 0.000. This strict imposition reduced the bias of creating arbitrary specialist cut-off values. After dividing the agents into these four groups (generalists and three types of specialists), we examined the results for wealth differentiation and rate of specialist development. 4.1. Wealth inequality In order to assess whether any signicant differences in the distribution of wealth existed between groups, we performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, and followed significant results by applying the TukeyeKramer method to the data. Further ANOVA and t-tests with different combinations of data allowed us to narrow down the signicantly different group(s), and Table 3 summarizes these ndings with the signicance values for t-tests between groups. In the default mode, there was no indication that any one group was signicantly richer or poorer than any other group. However, in both the one-product cap and twoproduct cap modes, a signicant difference is evident (italicized values, Table 3). When possession of Product A was capped at the outset of the model, specialist producers of A were able to accumulate wealth more effectively than any other agent group. A similar, though reciprocal, inequality emerged in the two-product cap mode, when both Product A and Product C were initially capped. In this case, the agents specializing in Product B lacked the capacity to accumulate wealth in the same way as other agent groups, and over time became signicantly poorer than other agents.

Table 3 P-value results of statistical testing for signicant wealth inequality, broken down by generalist and specialist groups and run type. Italicized values indicate signicant results, and thus signicant difference in wealth. These results demonstrate the same signicance as ANOVA and TukeyeKramer results (not shown). A-Specialists B-Specialists C-Specialists Generalists Default A-Specialists B-Specialists C-Specialists Generalists e 0.406 0.488 0.121 0.406 e 0.926 0.536 0.005 e 0.375 0.298 1.87E06 e 6.75E07 6.48E09 0.488 0.926 e 0.499 0.0001 0.375 e 0.028 0.727 6.75E07 e 0.814 0.121 0.536 0.499 e 0.014 0.298 0.028 e 0.857 6.48E09 0.814 e

OneA-Specialists e product B-Specialists 0.005 C-Specialists 0.0001 Generalists 0.014 TwoA-Specialists e product B-Specialists 1.87E-06 C-Specialists 0.727 Generalists 0.857

4.2. Product possession The results of statistical testing on the distribution in product possession between groups returned extremely small p-values, indicating that there is almost no chance the clearly skewed distribution of product possession observed in the model would occur by chance. Fig. 2 depicts the break down of product possession graphically. As can be seen, there are many consistencies over the three modes, for example, that generalists always owned the largest proportion of product, at nearly half of the total supply. In the default mode, specialists owned little of their least-cost product (consistently 2%), while the other two specialist groups shared possession of the remaining products circulating the system. In some ways, the results of the one-product cap mode also followed this pattern. The difference in this mode was that the wealthiest agent group, A-Specialists, took their increased wealth equally from the possessions of B- and C-Specialists, and owned just over onethird of the total amounts of Products B and C in the system. The results of the default mode and one-product cap mode were predictable in two ways. First, the low ownership of specialists is a function of the trade provisions built into the model, whereby possession of an agents own specialty product is reduced as it is sold to another agent whose production cost for the same item is higher. Secondly, recalling that wealth is simply the total amount of product owned by an agent, wealth disparity can only come about when an agent group over-compensates for the loss of its own specialty product with the possessions of other agent groups. The most unexpected results came from the two-product cap mode where the specialist producers of Product B, by far the poorest agent group, owned nearly as much of Product C as the generalist agent group. This contradicts the suggested symmetry of product possession seen in the other two modes. B-Specialists, rather than owning a small but equal amount of each product, instead invested almost all their wealth in one product. This may indicate an otherwise unobserved ranking of production specialists, whereby Products A and C were not equally valuable in the majority of local trading situations (though this conclusion warrants future examination). Another striking feature of product possession seen in Fig. 2 is the evident difference in total amount of products circulating in the system between the three run types. The default run allowed roughly 40% more product to enter the system than either of the capped product runs. 4.3. Specialist development Although the nal break down of labor division between generalists and the three specialist groups does not exhibit

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Fig. 2. Distribution of product possession by run type and product. Individual columns depict the break down of product ownership between generalists and specialist groups, with the columns height indicating the total amount of product in the system (averaged over 10 runs).

a signicant degree of variation between modes, the processes by which specialists developed through time do vary by mode, as depicted numerically in Table 4 and visually in Fig. 3. In default mode (Fig. 3, top panel), the number of specialists grew sharply between time steps 10 and 300, then grew more slowly until time step 1000, at which point the number of specialist agents remained steady until the end of the model run. The growth rate of all three specialist types (A, B, and C) followed the same pattern, ultimately reaching approximately 40e50 agents (Table 4). In one-product cap mode (Fig. 3, middle panel), B- and C-Specialist numbers grew steadily from time step 10 onwards until reaching a stable rate at time step 3000 with roughly 40 specialists of both types (Table 4). A-Specialist growth rate was much sharper between time steps 10 and 300, and again sharper through growth to a peak of nearly 60 specialists at time step 3000 (Table 4). The growth rate in twoproduct cap mode was even more pronounced (Fig. 3, bottom panel), with A-Specialists reaching by time step 1000 the same number of agents as seen in other modes at time step 3000. Growth

Fig. 3. Visual depiction of data in Table 4, showing the number of specialists at various time steps.

rate then slowed but continued to rise through time step 3000, with A- and C-Specialists averaging 50e60 individuals each (Table 4). B-Specialists averaged approximately 30 individual agents, the lowest nal average for any group in any mode (Table 4). 5. Discussion: general observations and archaeological implications 5.1. General observations The model demonstrates that diverse production strategies can converge to support the emergence of economic inequality. Even more, we nd this observation relevant when economic relationships function within the boundaries of normal human interaction networks, and are not simply the result of attempts to maximize economic prot above all else. The model also demonstrates that when small adjustments in supply and demand are made in a previously well-established and functioning production regime, a disparity in wealth quickly emerges. When a large-scale change to production strategy is introduced, those who are capable of making the adjustment are able to keep up economically, while those who do not quickly fall behind. These conditions may translate into opportunities for individuals, groups, and sometimes entire communities to move towards a hierarchical social order. Interestingly, the observations generated by this model support recent ndings that transmittable wealth is closely associated with persistent inequality (Borgerhoff Mulder et al., 2010; Shenk et al., 2010) and more complex social organization (Gurven et al., 2010). Our model can account for Smith et al.s (2010b) notions of both material wealth (livestock, land, tools, goods) and embodied wealth

Table 4 Average number of each type of specialist agent at various time steps, broken down by run type. Total number of specialist agents and proportion of total node-agents (out of 250 possible) also shown. Time step Average number of specialists A-Specialists B-Specialists C-Specialists Default 2 10 300 1000 3000 5000 2 10 300 1000 3000 5000 2 10 300 1000 3000 5000 0 4 32 44 47 44 0 5 39 45 57 52 0 8 44 57 54 59 0 4 31 40 39 47 0 3 18 32 41 37 0 4 22 25 34 32 0 3 33 44 41 41 0 3 21 34 43 44 0 10 52 58 56 53 0 11 96 128 127 131 0 11 78 111 142 134 0 21 117 139 144 145 0.0 4.6 38.4 51.2 51.0 52.6 0.0 4.5 31.3 44.5 56.6 53.5 0.0 8.6 46.9 55.6 57.5 57.9 Total % of Nodes

One-product

Two-product

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(skill, knowledge) in the Efciency factor granted to each agent. If we view the Efciency levels of agents in our model as representative of the wealth (material or embodied) transmitted from the previous generation, the differential accumulation and inequality of agents produced in the one- and two-product cap modes clearly demonstrate that inequality can be heritable. Importantly, our model also supports the recurring caveat to these recent studies: that high levels of inequality are unlikely to emerge without differential access to non-ubiquitous, storable or defendable resources such as land, technology, or animals (Smith et al., 2010a). 5.2. Implications for Early Bronze Age SE Arabia The production and exchange system that characterized the SE Arabia in the 3rd millennium BC incorporated geographical variations in resource availability, uneven distribution of technological knowledge, and a substantial degree of specialization, all within a tribally congured exchange economy. The overall model results support Weeks (2003) assertion that such a system can indeed foster wealth inequality, even as the majority of individuals benet. Specialization and economic disparity were intimately linked and were intrinsic to the internal socio-economic system of Early Bronze Age SE Arabia. They were not simply a response to, or product of, the incorporation of SE Arabia into the exchange systems of wider Bronze Age SW Asia and the related introduction into the SE Arabian exchange system of foreign luxury/prestige goods. In fact, the nature of exchange economy itself may have precipitated the social conditions for change by allowing individuals to prot disproportionately. Moreover, the model clearly suggests that the appearance of specialist producers and a concomitant wealth disparity emerges most quickly and to the highest degree precisely in scenarios of technological change, such as the Early Bronze Age of SE Arabia. Despite the difculties in attributing one mode to Early Bronze Age SE Arabia, it is clear that this was a period of technological ux. Thus, as niche markets appeared or older production strategies became obsolete, not only did specialist producers rapidly appear, but also differences in the ability to accumulate wealth developed, probably very quickly. Such differences in wealth could have represented an internally generated force for instability and change in a region where, as argued by Cleuziou and Tosi from the evidence of collective burials, social formations were underpinned by an ideology that promoted group identity, afliation, and equality ahead of personal acquisition and status (Cleuziou, 2003: p. 141; Tosi, 1989: pp. 155e156). The consolidation of material culture and the increasingly elaborate collective burial traditions of the later 3rd millennium BC in SE Arabia may be seen, in such a reconstruction, as an ideological response to the destabilizing forces of increased wealth disparity (e.g. Cleuziou, 2002: p. 209; Mry, 2010). In this context, it is signicant that in Cleuziou and Tosis Arabian tribal model, wealth and power are dissociated; power is situated in the kinship system and tribal relations whereas the accumulation of wealth e although not necessarily an explicit aim of the individual or group (Lancaster and Lancaster, 1992: p. 154) e can occur irrespective of ones position within the kinship system. This allows for egalitarian power systems to coexist alongside socio-economic disparity, and implies that a tribal ethos does not necessarily require equality in all measures. In the modern Arabian peninsula, Lancaster and Lancaster (1992: p. 154, 156) have stressed that wealth does not directly buy power, but is ltered through building a reputation of generosity and of being a good man; reputation is the currency that is capable of buying inuence, and may be regarded as a proxy for status and power. Depending on their position in existing socio-political

networks, aggrandizing individuals and groups in Bronze Age SE Arabia could have operated to either strengthen or challenge existing tribal structures, i.e. as agents either of continuity or of change. A nal implication of our agent-based modeling that is important for our understanding of Bronze Age SE Arabia relates to the impetus for intercultural contact and long-distance exchange that is so characteristic of the 3rd millennium BC. SE Arabias Bronze Age exchange economy produced individuals and groups with greater wealth who would have been ideal agents to promote exchange with neighboring regions seeking local resources such as copper and marine products. The prestige associated with such external contacts has been mentioned above, and Lancaster and Lancaster (1992: p. 157), moreover, have noted the importance of external contacts (including trade) in supporting the actions of more inuential or elite members of modern Arabian tribes. Rather than seeing the economic incorporation of SE Arabia into the wider Bronze Age world as a locally passive process of cultural reception driven by external (predominantly Mesopotamian) stimulus and demand, consideration of the economic and political motivations of SE Arabians affords them a much more active role in such developments. The specialization and wealth disparity generated by the internal SE Arabian exchange economy may have been as much of an inuence on Arabias interaction with the wider Bronze Age world as the Mesopotamian search for metals, stone, and timber. 6. Conclusion In studies of Bronze Age SE Arabia, traditional models explain local developments as stemming from the broad regional contact and exchange networks that characterized the greater Persian Gulf at this time. More recent studies emphasize the need to understand local systems of exchange and production as the possible progenitors e or at least facilitators e of the rapid social and technological changes observed archaeologically during the Hat (c. 3100e2700 BC) and the Umm an-Nar (c. 2700e2000 BC) periods. We have utilized an agent-based model that approximates social and technological conditions in Bronze Age SE Arabia to explore internal developments of production specialization and wealth inequality. The results of our model clearly demonstrate that small, localized variations in supply, demand, and production strategies have the overwhelming tendency to promote wealth inequality, even as the exchange system operates on social as well as economic rules. These results suggest that the localized diversity in resources, production, and exchange that characterized Bronze Age SE Arabia were factors as inuential as external contacts in sparking social and economic changes during this period. The use of agent-based modeling in archaeology has demonstrable benets towards enhancing our understanding of how localized actions foment broader-scale changes, and is particularly useful in contexts of multi-layered social and economic networks, such as that found in Bronze Age SE Arabia and neighboring regions. Acknowledgements The modeling component of this work was undertaken by one of the authors (LMR) at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, as part of the requirement for a Masters of Science degree. Thanks are due to Dr. Stephen Shennan for many conversations about the practical and conceptual approaches to modeling archaeological phenomena, and similarly, to Professor Clive Orton for his patient help in the statistical analysis of results. Several reviewers, both anonymous and known, are also greatly thanked for thoughtful and extremely helpful comments. As always, any

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L.M. Rouse, L. Weeks / Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011) 1583e1590 Graham, S., 2006. Networks, agent-based models and the Antonine itineraries: implications for Roman archaeology. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19, 45e64. Grifn, A.F., Stanish, C., 2007. An agent-based model of prehistoric settlement patterns and political consolidation in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia. Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences 2, 1e47. http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol2/iss2/art2 (accessed 15.12.09). Gurven, M., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Hooper, P.L., Kaplan, H., Quinlan, R., Sear, R., Schniter, E., von Rueden, C., Bowles, S., Hertz, T., Bell, A., 2010. Domestication alone does not lead to inequality: intergenerational wealth transmission among horticulturalists. Current Anthropology 51 (1), 49e64. Hjlund, F., 2007. The Burial Mounds of Bahrain: Social Complexity in Early Dilmun, Jutland. Archaeological Society Publications, Aarhus. Jin, E.M., Girvan, M., Newman, M.E.J., 2001. Structure of growing social networks. Physical Review E 64 (4), 046132. Joffe, A.H., 1991. Early Bronze I and the evolution of social complexity in the Southern Levant. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 4 (1), 3e58. Kohler, T.A., Van West, C.R., Carr, E.P., Langton, C.G., 1996. Agent-Based Modeling of Prehistoric Settlement Systems in the Northern American Southwest. Unpublished paper presented at the Third International Conference/Workshop on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling, Santa Fe, New Mexico. http:// www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/SANTA_FE_CD-ROM/sf_papers/kohler_tim/kohler. html (accessed 15.12.09). Lancaster, W., Lancaster, F., 1992. Tribal formations in the Arabian Peninsula. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 3, 145e172. Laursen, S.T., 2009. The decline of Magan and the rise of Dilmun: Umm an-Nar ceramics from the burial mounds of Bahrain, c. 2250e2000 BC. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 20, 134e155. Levy, T.E., 1983. The emergence of specialized pastoralism in the Southern Levant. World Archaeology 15 (1), 15e36. Low, B.S., Finkbeiner, D., Simon, C.P., 2005. Favored places in the selsh herd: trading off food and security. In: Booker, L., Forrest, S., Mitchell, M., Riolo, R. (Eds.), Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Articial Systems: Essays in Honor of John Holland. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 213e238. Mry, S., 2000. Les Cramiques dOman et lAsie Moyenne: une Archologie des changes lAge du Bronze. Centre National de la Recherche Scientique (CNRS), Paris. Mry, S., 2010. Results, limits and potential: burial practices and early Bronze Age societies in the Oman Peninsula. In: Weeks, L.R. (Ed.), Death and Burial in Arabia and Beyond: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 33e44. Potts, D.T., 2008. Arabian Peninsula. In: Pearsall, D.M. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Academic Press, New York, pp. 827e834. Ricardo, D., 1817. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. John Murray, London. Shenk, M.K., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Beise, J., Clark, G., Irons, W., Leonetti, D., Low, B.S., Bowles, S., Hertz, T., Bell, A., Piraino, P., 2010. Intergenerational wealth transmission among agriculturalists: foundations of agrarian inequality. Current Anthropology 51 (1), 65e83. Shennan, S.J., 1999. Cost, benet and value in the organization of early European copper production. Antiquity 73, 352e363. Smith, E.A., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Bowles, S., Gurven, M., Hertz, T., Shenk, M.K., 2010a. Production systems, inheritance, and inequality in premodern societies: conclusions. Current Anthropology 51 (1), 85e94. Smith, E.A., Hill, K., Marlowe, F.W., Nolin, D., Wiessner, P., Gurven, M., Bowles, S., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Hertz, T., Bell, A., 2010b. Wealth transmission and inequality among hunteregatherers. Current Anthropology 51 (1), 19e34. Stanish, C., 2004. The evolution of Chiefdoms: an economic anthropological model. In: Feinman, G.M., Nicholas, L.M. (Eds.), Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 7e24. Tosi, M., 1986. The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia. Annual Review of Anthropology 15, 461e490. Tosi, M., 1989. Protohistoric archaeology in Oman: the rst thirty years. In: Tosi, M., Costa, P.M. (Eds.), Oman Studies, Serie Orientale Roma LXIII. Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Rome, pp. 135e162. Watts, D.J., Strogatz, S.H., 1998. Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature 393, 440e442. Weeks, L.R., 2003. Early Metallurgy of the Persian Gulf: Technology, Trade and the Bronze Age World. Brill, Boston.

errors, including those in logic and interpretation, are unquestionably our own. Finally, we would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Professor Serge Cleuziou, one of the pioneering researchers of Arabias prehistoric past, whose theories are so central to the present work. His recent passing represents a great loss to Arabian archaeology.

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