Connecting the Dots: Towards Archaeological Network Analysis

Brughmans, Tom

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0092.2010.00349.x

Cited by 160 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Similarly, Tom Brughmans' work on Roman tablewares in east ern Mediterranean (Brughmans, 2010), followed by Brughmans and Poblome (2015), starts from a weighted bipartite network of sites and pottery forms, from which projections are made. In the same way as the two aforementioned authors, projected edges are also weighted by the number of cooccurrences.…”

Section: Quantifying Similarities To Infer Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wiring the Past: A Network Science Perspective on the Challenge of Archeological Similarity Networks

Prignano

Morer

Dı́az-Guilera

2017

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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Nowadays, it is a common knowledge that scholars from different disciplines, regardless of the specificities of their research domains, can find in network science a valuable ally when tackling complexity. However, there are many difficulties that may arise, starting from the process of mapping a system onto a network which is not by any means a trivial step. This article deals with those issues inherent to the specific challenge of building a network from archeological data, focusing in particular on networks of archeological contexts. More specifically, we address technical difficulties faced when constructing networks of contexts or sites where past interactions are inferred based on some kind of similarity between the corresponding assemblages (Archeological Similarity Networks or ASN). We propose a basic characterization in formal terms of ASN as a well-defined class of networks with its own specific features. Throughout the article, we devote special attention to the problem of quantifying the similarity between sites, especially in relation with the ubiquitous issues of data incompleteness and the reliability of the inferred ties. We argue that, generally speaking, human past studies are quite disconnected from the rest of interdisciplinary applications of network science and that this prevent this field from fully exploiting the potential of such methods. Our goal is to give hints about which are the interesting questions that archeological applications put on the table of network scientists. We suggest that such questions need to be translated into formal terms in order to be properly addressed within the framework of interdisciplinary collaborations. At this aim, a computational experiment is devised as an illustrative example of how simple models can help the cause.

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Section: Quantifying Similarities To Infer Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wiring the Past: A Network Science Perspective on the Challenge of Archeological Similarity Networks

Prignano

Morer

Dı́az-Guilera

2017

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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“…As yet, however, study of prehistoric social networks remains limited and mainly has been applied to island contexts such as the Pacific islands (Hage and Harary 1991), the Aegean archipelago (Broodbank 2000;Brughmans 2010;Evans et al 2009) and Viking Scandinavia (Sindbaek 2007a, b). In a social network approach sites (or islands) become nodes and connections between them edges, forming a simple graph.…”

Section: Special Issue: Innovation and Evolution Beyond The Tools • 119mentioning

confidence: 99%

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2011

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Archaeological interest in innovation traditionally focuses on creativity in material culture and, in the case of the Paleolithic, particularly on the changing morphology of stone tools. However, this is only one result of a constellation of innovative processes that occur both between and within hominin groups evolving towards the unique modern human lifeway. The adaptations scaffolding such innovative processes include not only the cognitive mechanisms and biological and skeletal adaptations that underpin technological innovation and cultural transmission, but also the behavioral strategies pursued by hominin groups and individuals. In this paper, we draw from a Social Brain approach to argue that it is hominins' innovative social and group-oriented behavioral strategies that drive technological developments and distinguish us from other primates. A variety of models and methodologies developed to investigate the interrelationships between the crucial ecological, social, and behavioral variables are reviewed here for an archaeological audience in order to stimulate research to test and refine these models with archaeological data.

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“…Similarly, each site is represented by a node. Finally, the discovery of an object in a site is represented by a link between the corresponding nodes of network ( Figure 3B; Mercklé, 2004;Brughmans, 2010). This construction leads to a so-called 2-mode network: links exist only between nodes of the two different categories (in other words, there are direct links neither between nodes associated to sites nor between nodes associated to objects).…”

Section: Methodology Formalizing Data: Thinking Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This network view gives access to a large set of network-specific tools designed to detect underlying structures in the data (Brughmans, 2010). Notice, however, that classical statistical methods (e.g., hierarchical clustering or multiple correspondence analysis) could also be applied to the original data.…”

Section: Methodology Formalizing Data: Thinking Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies are already based on the artifacts co-presence to highlight similarities and proximities between sites (Sindbaek, 2007a(Sindbaek, ,b, 2012(Sindbaek, , 2013Brughmans, 2010;Gerding, 2014, 2015;Jennings, 2016). However, even if the two perspectives are highly dependent on each other, only a few studies have been interested in the co-occurrences of objects in themselves.…”

Section: Co-presence Matricesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Co-presence Analysis and Economic Patterns: Mediterranean Imports in the Celtic World

Feugnet

Rossi²,

Filet

2017

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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This article presents one of the first steps of a project that aims at exploring the diffusion patterns of Mediterranean imported goods in Late Iron Age Europe (250-25 BC) and the organization of the commercial interactions of these goods. It brings together two archeologists and a mathematician in the study of a large inventory of 57,735 Italian and Greek imports discovered from England to Serbia. This large amount of new and unpublished data is analyzed through the joint use of network analysis tools and formal statistical methods. The analysis focuses on detecting patterns in the association of imported artifacts that are often found on the same sites. The objectives are to highlight groups of imports that may have circulated together and to emphasize regional selections by local populations. At this stage of the study, two main systems of imports have been highlighted used, respectively, in West and Central Europe. Interesting leads that will need further investigation include the imports status and the role they played in Celtic societies, as acculturated objects or more as objects for acculturation.

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Connecting the Dots: Towards Archaeological Network Analysis

Abstract: Summary.In

Cited by 160 publications

References 59 publications

Wiring the Past: A Network Science Perspective on the Challenge of Archeological Similarity Networks

Wiring the Past: A Network Science Perspective on the Challenge of Archeological Similarity Networks

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Co-presence Analysis and Economic Patterns: Mediterranean Imports in the Celtic World

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