Network analysis of archaeological data: a systematic approach

Östborn, Per; Gerding, Henrik

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.015

Cited by 55 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We render connections (links) between sites (nodes) by thresholding the Jaccard similarity, where a Jaccard similarity of ≥0.1 denotes the presence of a connection between two rock art sites. This allows us to highlight the number of connections present per site (the node degree) at different levels of similarity (Östborn and Gerding 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of Style, Diversity, and Similarity in Middle Orinoco Rock Art Assemblages

Riris

Oliver

2019

Arts

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The area encompassed by the Orinoco river basin is home to some of the largest and most diverse rock art sites in lowland South America. In this paper, we aim to formally describe the spatial distribution and stylistic attributes of rock engravings and paintings on both banks of the Orinoco, centred on the Átures Rapids. Drawing on an exhaustive literature review and four years of field survey, we identify salient aspects of this corpus by investigating patterns of diversity and similarity. Based on a stylistic classification of Middle Orinoco rock art, this permits us to discuss potential links, as well as notable discontinuities, within the assemblage and possibly further afield. We consider the theoretical implications of our work for the study of pre-Columbian art and conclude with some suggestions for advances in methods for achieving the goal of deriving broader syntheses.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of Style, Diversity, and Similarity in Middle Orinoco Rock Art Assemblages

Riris

Oliver

2019

Arts

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“…At Çatalhöyük these differences (e.g., between domestic and ritual) are always difficult to disentangle and various elements are intertwined in such a manner that separating or differentiating between them is impossible (Hodder, 2014a). This approach is based on the assumption that the higher the level of similarity between buildings, the higher the probability that they were somehow affiliated; this assumption forms the basis of previous archaeological network analyses (see Östborn and Gerding, 2014 for a review and Mills et al, 2018;Giomi and Peeples, 2019 for recent applications). Furthermore, this approach acknowledges that the complexity of Çatalhöyük's history can be grasped only by combining the widest possible number of datasets, even if they are not obviously related, and that a relational and contextual process of "assemblage" of strands of evidence is needed to produce robust interpretations (Hodder, 2014a(Hodder, , 2015.…”

Section: Tying the Knot: Socio-materials Similarity Network At çAtalhmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socio-Material Archaeological Networks at Çatalhöyük a Community Detection Approach

Mazzucato

2019

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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Vast in scale and densely inhabited, Late Neolithic Near Eastern megasites have been variously considered in relation to urbanity. Often viewed as failed experiments on the path to proper urbanism or proto-urban sites, these settlements reveal few signs of hierarchical social stratification despite their large size; as such, they represent a challenge for the understanding of early processes of community formation and social integration. Drawing upon a wide range of data and using socio-material network analysis as a methodological tool, this paper explores the way the late Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was organized internally and specifically the way individual houses were embedded in the wider social fabric of the site. This study sheds light on the nature of the networks of social engagement and affiliation that emerge in the Holocene within large early agricultural communities and the way such networks were manifested.

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“…In their study of the diffusion of fired bricks around Europe in the Hellenistic Period (Östborn and Gerding, 2015), Per Östborn and Henrik Gerding follow the approach presented in Östborn and Gerding (2014) for the configuration of the similarity network. Roughly, the strategy consists in allowing attributes of different nature to contribute to the comparison of sites, provided that each nature (e.g., numerical, categorical) goes with an adequate meaning of similarity.…”

Section: Quantifying Similarities To Infer Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Articles focusing on the case study, sometimes lack of methodological details, while not many methodological articles are available so far. Exceptions are found in Östborn and Gerding (2014), where the authors propose a systematic method to derive similarities from a combination of different types of attributes; and in Peeples and Roberts (2013), where the crucial aspect of binarizing or not a weighted network is accurately addressed. In few cases, some general considerations of the kind do appear along the literature.…”

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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Network analysis of archaeological data: a systematic approach

Cited by 55 publications

References 22 publications

Patterns of Style, Diversity, and Similarity in Middle Orinoco Rock Art Assemblages

Patterns of Style, Diversity, and Similarity in Middle Orinoco Rock Art Assemblages

Socio-Material Archaeological Networks at Çatalhöyük a Community Detection Approach

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

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