Southwest Social Networks in Late Prehistory
Professor Barbara Mills, University of Arizona
Jeffery Clark, Archaeology Southwest Preservation Archaeologist
In 2008, Archaeology Southwest and the University of Arizona were awarded a collaborative grant of $749,000 by the National Science Foundation’s Human and Social Dynamics Program. This project examines the structure and dynamics of social networks in the precontact (before Europeans arrived in the region) U.S. Southwest west of the Continental Divide, focusing on the period of time between A.D. 1200 and 1550. During that period, massive displacements of population coincided with the formation of aggregated villages throughout the area. Using information culled from reports, museum collections, and archaeological fieldwork, this project builds upon the Coalescent Communities database (CCD), an existing GIS database that includes roughly 2,000 late precontact sites across the Southwest.
The Southwest Social Networks (SWSN) project has several goals. The first is to add ceramics, obsidian sourcing, and public architectural data to the CCD as part of the SWSN database. The second is to characterize the structure and dynamics of social networks in the area at 50-year intervals during this period of upheaval and interconnectivity using high-resolution archaeological data. The third is to apply new methods and theories of social network analysis from sociology, physics, and mathematics to archaeology and to integrate social network theory with powerful tools of spatial analyses such as GIS. Project participants include archaeologists, GIS specialists, a geochemist, quantitative sociologists, and a computer scientist/physicist.
Southwestern archaeology has the potential to provide a “deep time” perspective on the rise and fall of social networks within a circumscribed environment. Social network analysis has largely concentrated on contemporary examples; this is the first application of social network theory and methods to a massive archaeological database that measures change over centuries. The time period under investigation has particular import for looking at the ways in which social networks guide migration pathways, as well as for examining the ways in which social networks are reconfigured during such social processes as migration, aggregation, and depopulation.
The first three years of the project focused on data collection and cleaning. More than 4.3 million ceramics from over 700 CCD sites have been added to the SWSN database. In addition, this database contains more than 5,100 sourced obsidian artifacts from 140 sites, the vast majority analyzed from existing collections and recent projects by the XRF Laboratory at Berkeley as part of this grant. Finally, public architecture data have been acquired from more than 600 sites.
Before ceramic-based social network analysis (SNA) was possible, a pan-Southwestern name and date concordance for thousands of pottery types (and spelling variations) had to be developed. This concordance distilled these numerous variants into a common ceramic vocabulary of 627 types grouped into 104 wares. Once the concordance was completed, a computer program was developed to apportion ceramics from multi-component sites (places with evidence of human activity during more than one distinct time period) into 50-year interval assemblages for comparative purposes. This program considers ceramic type dates and popularity, as well as site occupation span and population. This apportioning method will soon be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
As of early 2012, SNAs are well underway at a variety of spatial scales. SNAs have thus far emphasized decorated ceramics. Networks are created by comparing apportioned ceramic assemblages among all sites (nodes) from which we have data during a given 50-year interval. Sites with highly similar assemblages are considered to be connected. This allows us seven “snapshots in time” from A.D. 1200 to 1550 to view changes in network structure. Obsidian networks are also being explored and compared with ceramic social networks. Of particular interest are sites that did not use the nearest available obsidian source. Preliminary results of these SNA studies will be discussed in research team meeting at the School of Advanced Research in March 2012 and presented at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in April 2012.
We will continue to present our results to the public on this website, at lectures and events, and in widely distributed publications, such as Archaeology Southwest Magazine. Ultimately, Archaeology Southwest will curate the SWSN database.
Sites included in the Southwest Social Networks Project.
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