Sometimes when I read various explanations for events like the collapse of the Mayan civilization, or the end of the Bronze Age, it seems that the explanations and their assumptions about the conditions of the time would be possible to simulate in a digital environment. But upon googling for this type of study I couldn't find anything remotely related to the use of simulations to test historical theories. Have I missed something and, if not, why aren't such ideas being tested in digital environments?
The problem is that simulations are not going to be accurate as to be useful for historical study.
So how do you build a simulation to test, say, the bronze age collapse? Well you probably would need to build a mathematical/statistical model with endogenous and exogenous variables, much like how economists or financial analysts uses models to predict trends in the market. The problem first of all is that we lack data: mathematical models depend on numerical inputs and we barely know the specific events taking around 1200 BC, let along say: the population of Egypt on any given year, or the annual revenue of the Egyptian state.
So you are reduced to making up a lot of models from whole cloth, which of course your model is going to be clouded by your own assumptions in the first place: there's too many degrees of freedom for it to give you any useful information. We don't know, for instance what effect a drought had on population movements on the island of Sardinia, let along how many people a drop of 0.5 C over the course of 50 years would move off the island: even if we have some idea of what climate change does to population we don't have information on other variables on the island.
At the end of the day mathematical models are actually pretty bad at predicting human behavior: even in situations where we have a high degree of data to base those models on (see economics and finance) and even when the situations being modeled are small. Computers are not magical tools and the kind of simulation you are discussing would require complexity and predictive power order of magnitude greater than the best models we have today on anything involving human behavior.
/u/cartoonybear
A simulation is only as good as the model and the parameters used to drive the model. How does one build a model of the Bronze Age, or a model of the Mayan civilization? The issue is threefold:
How does one build a model. You mention big questions like "The Mayan civilization." How do you capture the political evolution, resource management, conflict, health, hygiene, etc. etc. etc.?
How do you find relevant input parameters to the model? For example, growth rate of food items under relevant conditions, temperature, rainfall, etc.
What do you compare your model against? Data is really a luxury, something hard to appreciate until you get into the detailed study of historical topics.
You can do a very simplified model of specific aspects of it, and those are fun when visualized. But to make insightful analysis based on such models is very difficult, in particular in explaining the why, the causation, the necessity.
As an example, I can build a stochastic mathematical simulation that can generate the same population dynamic as the Mayan civilization (assuming the data is available), but does this simulation explain the Mayan civilization? Nope. Just because two charts or visualizations seem to show the same trends does not mean the two phenomena are related.
That said, there are very insightful mathematical models that have shed some insight. But these tend to be specific, in order to make those three issues tractable. One recent work I like is by Drelichman and Voth, looking at royal solvency in a short period of the 16th century. They were lucky to have access to good data, parameters, and descriptions of rules of finances in that era.
So, caveat emptor: a model is only as good as what is put into that model. And that is exactly the challenge.