network analysis (Other Keyword)
26-50 (70 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehending the dynamics of regional interaction requires a holistic perspective. One artifact type falls short in capturing the richness of societal behavior, particularly when considering a sole attribute, such as paint style. Archaeologists are constrained by the availability of material culture and data, data...
Investigating Social Boundaries in Southwestern New Mexico (2018)
Social network analyses provide insight into the strength and weakness of social connections across geographic areas. Discussions in the literature of the Mimbres region in New Mexico have stated that during the Classic period, the Mimbres ceramic tradition is confined to southwestern New Mexico, though this has not been tested with statistical assessments of data. Using ceramic style data from sites within and surrounding the Mimbres region, I investigate the levels of social ‘boundedness’ in...
Ixtepeque Obsidian and the Polity: a Network and Boundary Approach in Southeastern Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (2012) borrow theoretical approaches from Bruno Latour (1996), Giddens (1984), and Bourdieu (1977) to highlight networks of shared inter-elite interaction in southeastern Mesoamerica that interpenetrate ethnic and political boundaries. The following paper builds upon...
Linking Multiple Scales in Time and Space: Small Worlds and World-Systems Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This contribution proposes that world-systems analysis could benefit from greater consideration of a local-scale, or “small world,” perspective. These maritime and terrestrial small worlds, defined by face-to-face interaction and often...
Mapping Archaeological Research 2004-2013: a network of sources, authors and concepts (2015)
Citations data provide an important but under-utilised resource through which to appreciate the structure and relationships of archaeology as a discipline. This data can be visually mapped to present the key structures of scientific disciplines. This poster will present three network maps of archaeological research based on an analysis of citations index data from more than 20,000 archaeological research outputs published between 2004 and 2013 inclusive. Each map contains information on more...
Market Exchange Seen Through the Mist: Network Visualization for Variable Data (2015)
In analyzing micro and mesoscale distribution systems, it is necessary to identify the economic structures and elucidate the socio-economic conditions governing the interaction of agents. Of particular interest in assessing economies of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean is the potential incorporation of extra-palatial actors in privatized production and non-centralized exchange. Central to this issue is the question of whether marketing activity was extant outside royal jurisdiction, providing...
Meaning, Networks, and Commodity Exchange: A Geographic Information System (GIS) Inter-site Distribution and Network Analysis of Wampum Beads (2015)
This paper will examine the role of wampum in the globally-connected western Great Lakes fur trade, with a focus on Fort St. Joseph, in Niles, Michigan, and the fort's position on the periphery of trade activities in New France. To explore wampum's spatial and temporal boundaries, I sampled data from the archaeological findings of historic sites throughout the Northeast and Midwest regions. GIS spatial analysis provided an alternate method of processing archaeologically-recovered and historic...
Mississippian Modes of Exchange: Documenting Shifting Networks and Distribution at Ancient Cahokia (2023)
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...
No Source, No Problem: Evaluating Connectedness from Geochemical Analysis of Pottery with a New Python Tool (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Compositional analysis techniques, such as laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) in combination with petrographic analysis, have been used to generate high resolution comparison of clay sources, pottery, and pottery manufacture sites. Studies that utilize these...
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...