Conflict, Migration, and the Transformation of Network Interrelationships in Mississippian West-Central Illinois: A Multilayer Social Network Analysis

Summary

Prior scholarship on intercultural contacts emphasizes interaction spheres, hybridization, technological transfer, or models of exchange as measures for constructing borders and defining societal membership. This presentation assesses how network relationships among complex and smaller-scale societies structured, and were restructured by, migration. Network models of social interaction and social identification are examined both prior to and following a migration process in a uniquely bellicose frontier region. In particular, the presentation addresses the role of ceramic industry in the transformation of communal scale interaction and identification networks across the middle to late Mississippian transition in the Late Prehistoric central Illinois River valley (ca. A.D. 1200-1450). Network models are analyzed to better understand how a circa 1300 A.D. in-migration of an Oneota tribal group restructured social relationships in a Mississippian chiefly environment and how communities of agents negotiated multicultural cohabitation in a region fraught with violence. A database of stylistic decorations elucidates categorical identification networks. Technological characterization data related to vessel form reveals interaction network models. Taken together, these networks create a multiple relations, or multilayer, network that is interrogated to demonstrate the role of network interrelationships as indicators of how both indigenous societies and migrant peoples approach intercultural social and economic relations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22730