Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Within the last 25 years, archaeologists have begun to use powerful computers and sophisticated statistical algorithms to identify network structures in archaeological data. This network analysis enables us to better study human interactions and the diffusion of information and cultural traditions from the scale of individuals to whole societies. Network analysis also allows archaeologists to infer the strength and direction of relationships among nodes (e.g., individuals or social units) and ties (e.g., kinship or shared identities) at multiple scales. Measures of centrality permit the identification of nodes that exert a strong influence on the structure of a network, often leading archaeologists to interpret such nodes as individuals or geographical centers of prestige, information, goods, and/or power. Researchers’ approaches to selecting archaeologically visible behavior for study, abstracting those data into formal network concepts, and transforming the archaeological data into network data varies greatly. This symposium illustrates diverse archaeological uses of network analysis and demonstrates the sophisticated interpretations of human behavior that such an approach can facilitate.