Networks, Community Detection, and Critical Scales of Interaction in the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest

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.

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 suggests that there may be certain critical scales at which human spatial interactions can be partitioned, allowing researchers to draw boundaries that provide insights into a variety of social phenomena. Thus far, this research has been focused on short time scales and has not explored the legacies of historic relationships on the evolution of network communities and boundaries over the long-term. In this paper, we examine networks based on material cultural similarity drawing on a large settlement and material culture database from the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest (ca. AD 800–1800; encompassing over 1,000,000 km2) divided into a series of short temporal intervals. With these temporally sequenced networks we (1) explore the utility of several methods of network community detection, (2) evaluate whether there are key phase transitions in the scales of network communities, and (3) explore the role of previous network configurations in the evolution of network communities through time.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32785