ABSTRACT

The objective of the EOS project (Doran 1982, 1992) is to investigate the growth of social complexity and, in particular, to formulate and experiment with an abstract computational version of an informal model proposed by Paul Mellars (1985) of the growth of social complexity in the Upper Palaeolithic period in southwestern France. At the heart of the project is the use of the concepts and techniques of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) (Bond & Gasser 1988) to enable cognitive factors to be incorporated into the computational version of Mellars’s model. The computational model has been programmed to run on a computer, and its behaviour studied.