network analysis (Other Keyword)
26-50 (60 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates changes in distribution at the ancient Mississippian site of Cahokia using social network analysis. Over the course of its history, Cahokia transformed from a small village to a large macroregional center. This transformation was accompanied by a marked increase in institutional complexity, specialization, rank/class differences,...
Mobilities of Potters and Pot Painters in Ancient Mediterranean: The Test Cases of Classical Athens and Southern Italy (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movements of artists and artisans was a common phenomenon in Eastern Mediterranean both in prehistoric and historical times, with sculptors and wall painters being the most frequently mentioned in ancient texts. The mobility of makers of figured ceramics in Classical Athens and in Southern Italy has often been posited based on stylistic affinities, but not...
Modeling small world networks in the Cyclades (Greece) (2016)
This paper explores how community interaction can be modeled on a local scale using the Early Bronze Age Cyclades (Greece) as a case study. Small worlds—the local, intensive networks of interaction among communities in the Aegean islands—sustained essential ties among small communities that had limited subsistence and few labor resources (Tartaron 2008: 109). By combining material evidence for exchange and ritual deposition, environmental data, and cost-surface analyses of travel time and...
Modelling the Connectivity of Socioeconomic Networks of Copper Production in Ancient Northern Oman (2018)
With over 5000 years of production history, Oman was a major ancient source of copper, participating in a trade network that supplied a large part of the ancient world, the extent of which has yet to be fully mapped. As part of the Archaeological Water Histories of Oman (ArWHO) Project, we have been working since 2012 in the Ad-Dhahirah Governorate of Oman to clarify the structure of ancient copper production networks. Methodologically, our investigations employ satellite imagery analysis to map...
A Molecular Networking Approach to Identifying Metabolites in GC-MS Spectra from the Gastrointestinal Contents of Mummies of Tarapacá-40 (Northern Chile, Formative Period, 1000 BCE–600 CE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eight samples from the gastrointestinal tracts of mummies exhumed at the Formative cemetery site of Tarapacá-40 (Northern Chile, Formative Period, 1000 BCE–600 CE) were solvent extracted, silylated, methylated, and injected into a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) to identify biologically relevant metabolites. The resultant .raw files of these...
A Monte Carlo Approach to Estimating Plausible Ceramic Similarity Values from Fabric Characterizations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic characterization studies often depend on estimates of similarities and differences in assemblages drawn from relatively small samples to address questions regarding a range of social patterns and processes. In most cases, such characterizations do not consider uncertainty due to sampling error nor do they...
Multilayer Networks and Relational Plurality: The Scales and Sources of Social Capital across Southern Appalachia, A.D. 1150–1350 (2018)
The scale and structure of the relationships through which social capital is generated, amassed, and controlled must be understood if we are to evaluate the emergence and evolution of organizationally complex social, political, and economic institutions. At any one point in time however, actors or entities are undoubtedly embedded and engaged in a number of distinct, yet overlapping, relational fields. In this paper I interrogate three networks, representing three separate sets of relationships,...
A Network Approach to Zooarchaeological Datasets (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological datasets are often large, complex, and difficult to visualize and communicate. Many visual aids and summaries often limit the patterns that can be identified and our interpretations of relationships between contexts, species, and environmental information. The most commonly used of these often include bar charts, pie charts,...
A Network Model of Co-Rulership and Community Ritual in Teotihuacan: From Neighborhoods to Districts (2018)
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of a powerful dynasty of rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. However, the alternative possibility of a corporate or collective government, perhaps headed by a small number of co-rulers, also remains poorly understood. A third option is that the city’s...
Network Models for the Emergence of Transportation Infrastructures in Central Italy (1175/1150─500 BC ca) (2018)
The period between the Late Bronze Age and the Archaic Age is a time of change and development in the Italian Peninsula, leading to the formation of the first city-states. In this study, we focused on the Tyrrhenian regions of Latium Vetus and Southern Etruria, by analyzing the emergence of the network of terrestrial routes as it has been inferred from archaeological evidences. Our goal was to explore the mechanisms that shaped the overall structure of these past transportation...
A Network-Based Approach to the Study of Neolithic Pottery Production in the Tavoliere (Apulia, Italy) (2016)
The Tavoliere has one of the densest concentrations of Neolithic settlement in Europe and is known for its wide repertoire of pottery styles. Using network analysis techniques, this study explores Neolithic pottery production in the region by integrating typological analysis with petrography and elemental characterization using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry. In doing so, we reveal sets of choices made at multiple stages of the production processes and in turn shed light on the...
Networks of the Dead: exploring patterns of homogeneity and diversity in the precolonial Caribbean using network analysis (2017)
The precolonial Caribbean shows great diversity in burial patterns across time and space, making the interpretation of funerary behavior very complex. While some broad trends in funerary practices have been noted, a simple assessment of the frequency of different burial practices in the region reveals a range of body positions and body treatment, as well as burial location, and grave goods. In this paper we use statistical and network explorative approaches to map these variable practices. A...
Networks, Community Detection, and Critical Scales of Interaction in the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized that spatial relationships are an important influence on and driver of all manner of social processes at scales from the local to the continental or even beyond. Recent research in the realm of complex networks focused on community detection in human networks...
New Revelations on Mediterranean Bronze Age Iberia through Network Inference (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valencian Bronze Age, located in the modern-day province of Valencia, Spain is an overlooked player in Mediterranean prehistory. The inhabitants are the indigenous peoples and precursors to the Iberians, so famously cited by the Romans, yet so little cited despite being demonstrably connected to the trends of...
Obsidian Procurement and Exchange in Peru: A Social Network Analysis (SNA) (2018)
Wider accessibility to analytical instruments has resulted in the rapid expansion of geochemical datasets useful to trace archaeological materials such as obsidian to their geologic source. While these findings are useful on a site-to-site basis, this paper utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) as an exploratory tool to investigate broad-scale patterns of obsidian procurement and exchange in prehistoric Peru. Alongside visualizations of this large dataset, centrality measurements allow us to...
Off the beaten track: exploring what lies outside paths of most frequently cited publications in citation networks (2015)
Most citation network analysis techniques are designed to identify the main paths of the ‘flow of academic influence’ through a citation network, or result in a ranking of publications with the highest scores for certain network measures. Although such results are interesting, they are not always particularly surprising. A recent application of citation network techniques to a network of archaeological literature concluded that a literature review will allow one to identify key works and the...
Open Space and Restricted Action: Analysis of Intra-site Networks of Movement at Wimba, in the Northeastern Peruvian Montane Forest (2017)
In an area that has been considered marginal both geographically and in the narrative of South American prehistory, new research shows extensive settlement, landscape modification, and interaction between inhabitants of the eastern slopes of the Andes and their neighbors. The site of Wimba, located in the Amazonas department, in the northeastern Peruvian montaña – the tropical montane forest between the highland Andes and lowland Amazonian rainforest – is one of the best known archaeological...
Overlapping and Shifting Networks: Comales, Spouses and Other Social/Material Interactions between/within Highlands and Coast in Colonial Guatemala (2018)
Ceramic assemblages of Postclassic and Colonial Maya sites in highland and coastal Guatemala are dominated by comales: griddle-like cooking vessels indicative of a maize tortilla diet. Given that some archaeologists have interpreted the appearance of the nixtamal/tortilla/comal complex in Guatemala as evidence of the "Mexicanization" of the Maya region, the Pacific coastal region of Guatemala -and its Central Mexican diasporic populations- is seen as the likely source of comales. As a result,...
A Probabilistic Approach to Constructing Networks in the Kuril Islands (2018)
One of the persisting challenges in archaeological network analysis is how to incorporate both temporal and spatial information into network models generated from the archaeological record. This paper tackles this issue by introducing a protocol that places probabilistic weights on potential network connections between archaeological sites, combining time-varying probabilities quantifying contemporaneous site occupation and space-dependent probabilities based on geographic distance. The...
Reconfiguring Social Networks: The Emergence of Social Complexity Before and After Urbanism on Cyprus (2018)
Despite the lack of cities, the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2400-1700 cal BC), an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, witnesses high wealth inequality and spatiotemporal variation in the emergence of social complexity or hierarchical social networks. Previous research has shown that social networks are malleable and cycle between egalitarian and hierarchical in different facets of complexity (control of labor, access to resources, participation in trade networks) through the Prehistoric...
Reconstructing and Testing Ancient Neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neighborhoods in the past formed in urban contexts from the bottom-up through repeated face-to-face interactions. Through these shared social experiences and relational identity, neighborhood groups would possess a high potential for collective action, facilitating local solutions to issues facing...
Reconstructing Social Networks: Using 3D Scans to Infer Networks of Shared Manufacture Knowledge in Late Bronze Age Central Europe (2017)
This project is a case study using 3D scans of Late Bronze Age swords (~1200-800BC) to recreate community networks of knowledge. Measurements from 111 3D scans of bronze sword hilts were taken based on characteristics related to manufacture and style, including cross sections. Fourier analysis was used to represent the curvature of cross sections numerically. The measurements taken and the results of the Fourier analyses were then processed using principal component analysis to combine related...
Reinventing by the Wheel: Ceramic Networks and New Approaches to the Study of Political Economies (2017)
This paper explores the value of network analysis as a method for the quantitative assessment of trade systems with the aim of profiling the structural nature of their associated political institutions. This study will focus on trade in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700 to 1200 BCE), and includes a network analysis of Cypriot and Mycenaean pottery circulated throughout Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant. The analysis of ceramic distribution networks demonstrates a high...
The Risks and Rewards of Network Position in the Chaco World (2018)
In a previous study Peeples and Haas (2013) compared brokerage (intermediate) positions in networks of ceramic similarity to measures of settlement growth and longevity for the late pre-Hispanic western U.S. Southwest (A.D. 1200-1500). Counter to expectations from many contemporary network studies where brokerage positions are associated with long-term advantage, this work instead suggested that broker settlements tended to be small, short-lived, and that brokerage was temporary. This example...
A Social Network Exploration of Models of Social Space and Community Organization at Moundville (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Moundville is one of the largest Mississippian sites in North America consisting of at least 29 earthen mounds positioned around an open plaza. Numerous researchers have remarked on the regularized spatial layout of the site, arguing that the formal arrangement of the mounds and plaza reflect social...