New Revelations on Mediterranean Bronze Age Iberia through Network Inference

Summary

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 the "outside" world. This research explores the social structures of the Valencian Bronze Age though the use of social network analysis. Information on hundreds of Valencian sites is available, and multiple lines of data (ceramic, metal, and bone) are used for network inference on over 300 sites. This presentation will introduce a form of network inference based on Information theory, a strategy from bioinformatics where it is commonplace to infer social connections from interactions that are not directly observable. Thus, this research demonstrates how to integrate hundreds of bits of disparate archaeological information over an entire region and move toward characterizing social structure in a reproducible and comparable way, without benefit of the written record or observable events. Additionally, and possibly most importantly, it makes new discoveries about social processes through time and space in Iberian prehistory and the Mediterranean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24462