I've done quite a bit for archeology and it's moderately prevalent in the literature. You can implement simple simulations yourself without much effort or use o

I've done quite a bit for archeology and it's moderately prevalent in the literature. You can implement simple simulations yourself without much effort or use one of the many environments like NetLogo that provide out of the box support. They're best used like thought experiments that are too big to keep in your head, in my experience. Done well, they illuminate dynamics that weren't necessarily obvious at the beginning that you can circle back on with other methodologies. However, there are some downsides. It's an art to make interesting, simple models that don't evolve to a steady state in some way. You can get around this with more variables , but that's aesthetically unsatisfying. You can also increase the resolution of the simulation, but at the high end you have trouble getting enough data and writing the simulation can take years of effort (e.g. Village ecodynamics project). Using them predictively is also on shaky theoretical ground. Avoid doing that if possible.