Network Analysis in Archaeology New Approaches to Regional Interaction

While the study of networks has grown exponentially in the past decade and is now having an impact on how archaeologists study ancient societies, its emergence in the field has been dislocated. This volume provides a coherent framework on network analysis in current archaeological practice by pulling together its main themes and approaches to show how it is changing the way archaeologists face the key questions of regional interaction. Working with the term 'network' as a collection of nodes and links, as used in network science and social network analysis, it juxtaposes a range of case studies and investigates the positives and negatives of network analysis. With contributions by leading experts in the field, the volume covers a broad range: from Japan to America, from the Palaeolithic to the Precolumbian.

1 - Introduction: why networks? Carl Knappett
2 - Social network analysis and the practice of history
3 - 'O what a tangled web we weave' - towards a practice that does not deceive
4 - Broken links and black boxes: material affiliations and contextual network synthesis in the Viking world
5 - Positioning power in a multi-relational framework: a social network analysis of Classic Maya political rhetoric
6 - What makes a site important? Centrality, gateways and gravity
7 - Evolution of prestige good systems: an application of network analysis to the transformation of communication systems and their media
8 - The dynamics of social networks in the Late Prehispanic U.S. Southwest
9 - Social networks, path dependence, and the rise of ethnic groups in pre-Roman Italy
10 - Re-thinking Jewish ethnicity through social network analysis
11 - Grounding the net: social networks, material culture and geography in the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic of the Near East (~21-6,000 cal BCE)
12 - Evaluating adaptive network strategies with geochemical sourcing data: a case study from the Kuril Islands
13 - Old boy networks in the indigenous Caribbean
14 - Archaeology, networks, information processing, and beyond

Professor Carl Knappett teaches in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, where he is Walter Graham/ Homer Thompson Professor of Aegean Prehistory. His previous books include An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society (2011), Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, and Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, the latter coedited with Lambros Malafouris.