Archaeology, History, and Modeling the Past: Neglected Assumptions

Summary

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

For archaeologists, finding something from the past is more than its own reward. When what they have “recovered” can be interpreted as playing plausible roles in convincing historical narratives, they have reason to believe they are doing something extraordinary: fleshing out our ignorance of history with factual evidence of what may have truly happened. For several decades now, some archaeologists have championed using social network analysis (SNA) to tease out statistically how the relative spatial positioning of things, places, and people may have informed what could (or couldn’t) have happened in the past. Last year my colleagues and I introduced an alternative strategy for using relational analysis in archaeology and other historical sciences. Instead of reconstructing spatial ties as the principal goal, we argue that relational thinking can be used to develop testable hypotheses about covariation and causal patterning. While the hypotheses considered can be about how differing spatial relationships could have been instrumental in the past, they need not be. Using the modeling strategy we call dynamic relational analysis (DYRA), they can also be about relationships—causal contingencies—of many forms among things, places, and people.

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

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38881.0