MESS

In a few thousand years, Southern Mesopotamia developed from a thinly inhabited landscape of marshes and ridges into a quite densely inhabited area, with its many cities depending on irrigated farming along the ridges to a considerable extent. As archaeological records provide snapshots of this development, with especially the early phases obscured in the record, modelling possible conditions of the emergence of Mesopotamian’s irrigation-based societies is of interest – especially to find out how expansion of irrigated farming and associated trade could support development of larger settlements and ultimately cities. Such modelling, however, has quite some requirements. First and foremost, one needs a realistic modelling setup in which irrigation, decisions and outcomes are acceptable. Second, the effects that the model shows on the longer term need to be validated against the available archaeological data. Third, which was also the main challenge for the MESS project was to develop modelling setups that can simulate such long periods in a relatively brief time – otherwise waiting for model results to check may take weeks! Therefore, MESS has create a software tool that assists in translating useful modelling approaches that were already available in a specific modelling language (called NetLogo) to programming code that can be used in so-called High-Performance Computing environments. The tool that MESS developed is called Kunefe and can be used to prepare the same code for running multiple times using new sets of model values for each run. This will result in many modelling results in a shirt time period. These modelling results can then be analyzed.