The increasingly permanent, large‐scale communities that developed in Southwest Asia in the early Neolithic, and that have been the norm in many societies ever since, mark a significant break with the highly mobile, fission–fusion forms of social organization shared by all earlier human and, indeed, other primate forebears. While economic, ecological, and cultural changes were clearly an important part of the transition, the social changes that accompanied them have received considerably less attention, despite the fact that they may have been critical elements of the transition. Network methods specifically designed for visualizing and analyzing changes in social structure thus offer enormous potential for examining the momentous social changes that occurred at this time.