Network Analysis in the Tairona Chiefdoms: Settlement Patterns and Social interaction in the El Congo Microbasin, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

Summary

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

This paper seeks to present the results of network analysis for the case of the chiefdom communities that inhabited the northwestern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from AD 400 to 1600 in the El Congo microbasin. Through the use of statistical algorithms in R language and databases in geographic information systems, this paper seeks to present how network analysis can provide information on settlement patterns at a regional scale and how the spatial distribution of small local and supralocal communities, together with their social interaction networks, allows an evaluation of the strength and direction of relationships between social units in economic and political terms. Using quantitative methods oriented to investigate measures of centrality, this paper also aims to be a case study for archaeological research regarding the emergence of chiefdom communities in the Intermediate Area, by pointing out how network analysis in archaeology and the study of settlement patterns allows the identification of demographic centers that originated complex socioeconomic relationships that determined decision making in precolumbian chiefdom communities.

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): 38373.0