Reconstructing Regional Material, Spatial, and Demographic Networks in the US Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many recent archaeological approaches to formally reconstructing past regional networks have relied on either spatial data (travel costs or features such as roads/trails) or patterns in material culture similarities and distributions. Spatial distance and material patterns are clearly often related to each other in complex ways, and existing work suggests that different parameters may drive interaction at various spatial and social scales. In this paper, we explore methods for combining material similarity, spatial constraints, and population size into a single common metric of flow probability among settlements using data from the US Southwest from the cyberSW database. Our approach combines common material similarity network methods used in archaeology with non-parametric models of population radiation and expected interaction. Initial results suggest that combining both geographically expected and materially observed interaction into a common interaction metric produces networks with properties that more closely resemble observable empirical social networks (i.e., log-normal degree distributions and modularity) than networks generated by either material or geographic proxies alone.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50032