What Do Archaeological Networks Reveal? Comparing New Guinean Material Culture with Ethnographic Network Structure

Summary

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.

Network analysis has become increasingly common within archaeological practice during the last decade, yet little consensus exists as to what networks based on material culture actually reveal about ancient social life. Archaeologists have variably interpreted communities or cliques derived from stylistic, technological, or provenience data as communities of practice, ethnic markers, or catnets. However, archaeological network practitioners have yet to offer a compelling linkage between material networks and anthropological and archaeological understandings of process and structure. I report on the results of a comparison of twentieth-century ethnographic material from the island of New Guinea with the structure of intercommunity ties as documented by over a century of intensive ethnographic research. The results show that underlying patterns of interaction do significantly structure material cultural patterning, but that the relationship is complex and does not allow for easy network reconstruction based on archaeological material. Nor does material culture clearly code ethnic or linguistic structure. This leaves open the question of what cultural and social significance shared material culture may index, and suggests that more sophisticated network inference algorithms may be required to construct meaningful networks from archaeological data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32030