A Network Approach to Zooarchaeological Datasets

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Zooarchaeological datasets are often large, complex, and difficult to visualize and communicate. Many visual aids and summaries often limit the patterns that can be identified and our interpretations of relationships between contexts, species, and environmental information. The most commonly used of these often include bar charts, pie charts, and other such graphs. These aid in categorizing data and highlighting the differences or similarities between categories. While such simplification is often necessary for effective communication, it can also obscure the full range of complexity of zooarchaeological datasets. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of formal network graphs to capturing the complexity of zooarchaeological datasets and to effectively highlighting the kinds of relationships between contexts, time, and faunal assemblages in which zooarchaeologists are primarily interested. Using a case study from southwestern Florida (USA), we argue that network graphs provide a quick solution to visualizing the structure of zooarchaeological datasets and serve as a useful aid in interpreting relational patterns, especially those indicative of environmental change and human behavior through time and across space.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35854.0