The Socio-Ecological Determinants of Community Centers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Community centers often play a dual role in archaeological contexts, as a civic space where individuals can participate in shared rituals and exchange and as a residential space connecting a large number of unrelated households. Given that these two roles are not perfectly coincident with each other, it is interesting to consider why community centers get established where and when they do. Is it more about local resource needs or the distribution of the wider community? We propose to investigate this question using a spatial network framework applied to data derived from cyberSW, in three regions across the US Southwest: central Mesa Verde, the northern Rio Grande, and the Cibola area. In particular, we explore how community centers evolved in or near dispersed farming communities by describing a dense network for each region, with edge weights defined by commute times and node attributes defined by hindcasted climate variables relevant to maize farming. We then compare environmental conditions in and near the locations of those centers to two measures of network centrality (closeness and betweenness), with a focus on how those changed over time. Our results can help inform on broader discussions in urban science and economic geography.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38416.0