Formal network analyses have a long history in archaeology but have recently seen a rapid florescence. Network models drawing on approaches from graph theory, social network analysis, and complexity ...science have been used to address a broad array of questions about the relationships among network structure, positions, and the attributes and outcomes for individuals and larger groups at a range of social scales. Current archaeological network research is both methodologically and theoretically diverse, but there are still many daunting challenges ahead for the formal exploration of social networks using archaeological data. If we can face these challenges, archaeologists are well positioned to contribute to long-standing debates in the broader sphere of network research on the nature of network theory, the relationships between networks and culture, and dynamics of social networks over the long term.
Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This article instead focuses on the human ...experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the US Southwest and the North Atlantic. The transformations, including changes in human securities, were coded based on expert knowledge and data analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis techniques. Results point to the following conclusions: Major transformations, including collapses, generally have a strong and negative impact on human security; flexible strategies that facilitate smaller scale changes may ameliorate those difficulties. Community security is strongly implicated in these changes; strong community security may minimize other negative changes. The relationships among the variables are complex and multi-causal; while social transformation may lead to declines in human securities, declining conditions of life can also push people to transform their societies in negative ways. Results show that some societies are better able to deal with difficulties than others. One important policy implication is that community security and local conditions can be instrumental both in helping people to cope with difficulties and in staving off some of those difficulties. A multi-scalar approach is essential as we face the increasing problems of climate change in the decades ahead.
The late pre-Hispanic period in the US Southwest (A.D. 1200–1450) was characterized by large-scale demographic changes, including long-distance migration and population aggregation. To reconstruct ...how these processes reshaped social networks, we compiled a comprehensive artifact database from major sites dating to this interval in the western Southwest. We combine social network analysis with geographic information systems approaches to reconstruct network dynamics over 250 y. We show how social networks were transformed across the region at previously undocumented spatial, temporal, and social scales. Using well-dated decorated ceramics, we track changes in network topology at 50-y intervals to show a dramatic shift in network density and settlement centrality from the northern to the southern Southwest after A.D. 1300. Both obsidian sourcing and ceramic data demonstrate that long-distance network relationships also shifted from north to south after migration. Surprisingly, social distance does not always correlate with spatial distance because of the presence of network relationships spanning long geographic distances. Our research shows how a large network in the southern Southwest grew and then collapsed, whereas networks became more fragmented in the northern Southwest but persisted. The study also illustrates how formal social network analysis may be applied to large-scale databases of material culture to illustrate multigenerational changes in network structure.
Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security Nelson, Margaret C.; Ingram, Scott E.; Dugmore, Andrew J. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2016, Volume:
113, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For ...each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the “weight” of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy.
Recent research in ecology suggests that generic indicators, referred to as early warning signals (EWS), may occur before significant transformations, both critical and non-critical, in complex ...systems. Up to this point, research on EWS has largely focused on simple models and controlled experiments in ecology and climate science. When humans are considered in these arenas they are invariably seen as external sources of disturbance or management. In this article we explore ways to include societal components of socio-ecological systems directly in EWS analysis. Given the growing archaeological literature on 'collapses,' or transformations, in social systems, we investigate whether any early warning signals are apparent in the archaeological records of the build-up to two contemporaneous cases of social transformation in the prehistoric US Southwest, Mesa Verde and Zuni. The social transformations in these two cases differ in scope and severity, thus allowing us to explore the contexts under which warning signals may (or may not) emerge. In both cases our results show increasing variance in settlement size before the transformation, but increasing variance in social institutions only before the critical transformation in Mesa Verde. In the Zuni case, social institutions appear to have managed the process of significant social change. We conclude that variance is of broad relevance in anticipating social change, and the capacity of social institutions to mitigate transformation is critical to consider in EWS research on socio-ecological systems.
In social network analysis, brokerage refers to the processes through which individuals or larger groups mediate interactions between actors that would otherwise not be directly connected. Brokers ...occupy key intermediate positions that have alternately been interpreted as sources of social capital or potential disadvantages. Recent empirical studies suggest that the relationship between brokerage and rewards or risks varies considerably depending on the nature of interactions in a given setting. In this study, we use a large settlement and ceramic database including sites across the western U.S. Southwest (C.E. 1200–1400) to identify settlements that likely filled brokerage roles in ceramic networks. We develop a new structural measure of brokerage and compare long-term outcomes for settlements characterized by varying degrees of brokerage. We argue that brokerage was not a major source of social capital in our study area, as interactions instead favored the formation of discrete groups over such intermediate positions. En el análisis de redes sociales, intermediación se refiere a los procesos a través de los cuales individuos o grupos más grandes sirven de mediadores en interacciones entre actores que podrían de otra manera no estar directamente conectados. Los intermediadores ocupan posiciones intermedias importantes que alternativamente han sido interpretadas como fuentes de capital social o potenciales desventajas. Estudios empíricos recientes sugieren que la relación entre intermediadores y recompensas o riesgos varia considerablemente dependiendo de la naturaleza de las interacciones en un contexto dado. En este estudio usamos un asentamiento grande y una base de datos de cerámicas incluyendo sitios a través del sur del Suroeste de los Estados Unidos (1200-1400 E.C.) para identificar asentamientos que llenaron los papeles de intermediarios en redes de cerámica. Desarrollamos una nueva medida estructural de intermediación y comparamos resultados de largo plazo para poblaciones caracterizadas por diferentes grados de intermediación. Argüimos que la intermediación no fue una fuente mayor de capital social en nuestra área de estudio en la medida en que interacciones en cambio favorecieron la formación de grupos discretos en vez de tales posiciones intermedias.
We propose a dedicated research effort on the determinants of settlement persistence in the ancient world, with the potential to significantly advance the scientific understanding of urban ...sustainability today. Settlements (cities, towns, villages) are locations with two key attributes: They frame human interactions and activities in space, and they are where people dwell or live. Sustainability, in this case, focuses on the capacity of structures and functions of a settlement system (geography, demography, institutions) to provide for continuity of safe habitation. The 7,000-y-old experience of urbanism, as revealed by archaeology and history, includes many instances of settlements and settlement systems enduring, adapting to, or generating environmental, institutional, and technological changes. The field of urban sustainability lacks a firm scientific foundation for understanding the long durée, relying instead on narratives of collapse informed by limited case studies. We argue for the development of a new interdisciplinary research effort to establish scientific understanding of settlement and settlement system persistence. Such an effort would build upon the many fields that study human settlements to develop new theories and databases from the extensive documentation of ancient and premodern urban systems. A scientific foundation will generate novel insights to advance the field of urban sustainability.
Over the last several years, network methods and models from the social and physical sciences have gained considerable popularity in archaeology. Many of the most common network methods begin with ...the creation of binary networks where links among some set of actors are defined as either present or absent. In most archaeological cases, however, the presence or absence of a specific kind of relationship between actors is not straightforward as we must rely on material proxies for assessing connections. A common approach in recent studies has been to define some threshold for the presence of a tie by partitioning continuous relational data among sites (e.g., artifact frequency or similarity data). In this article, using an example from the U.S. Southwest, we present a sensitivity analysis focused on the potential effects of defining binary networks from continuous relational data. We show that many key network properties that are often afforded social interpretations are fundamentally influenced by the assumptions used to define connections. We suggest that, although network graphs provide powerful visualizations of network data, methods for creating and analyzing weighted (non-binarized) networks often provide a better characterization of specific network properties.
•Network properties are highly sensitive to the methods used to create binary ties.•The use of weighted network data improves characterizations of network properties.•Network binarization is unnecessary for many common forms of archaeological data.
Research in psychology has established that humans organize spatial information into “cognitive maps” oriented around visual landmarks. Much of this research focuses on individual cognitive processes ...such as orienteering and wayfinding. We extend this research to the level of social groups, exploring the degree to which cognitive maps are shared among near and distant neighbors and the social implications of common, overlapping, or discrete cognitive maps. We develop the concept of “sight communities” —populations which shared similar cognitive maps—and then propose methodologies to (1) identify visual anchors and quantify their visual prominence from different vantage points, and (2) detect and analyze connections among the populations which were able to see visual anchors, with a special focus on tools from social network analysis.
Some human settlements endure for millennia, while others are founded and abandoned within a few decades or centuries. The reasons for variation in the duration of site occupation, however, are ...rarely addressed. Here, the authors introduce a new approach for the analysis of settlement longevity or persistence. Using seven regional case studies comprising both survey and excavation data, they demonstrate how the median persistence of individual settlements varies widely within and among regions. In turn, this variability is linked to the effects of environmental potential. In seeking to identify the drivers of settlement persistence in the past, it is suggested that archaeologists can contribute to understanding of the sustainability and resilience of contemporary cities.
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