Collaborative Research: The Structure and Dynamics of Social Networks in the Southwest

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This project examines the structure and dynamics of social networks in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest. It examines the period of time between A.D. 1200 to 1550, when there were massive displacements of population that coincided with the formation of large, aggregated villages throughout the area. Using information culled from unpublished and published reports, museum collections, and limited archaeological fieldwork it supplements an existing database of known Native American settlements in the region that was developed with prior NSF funding. The project has five major goals. First is to add material culture information (especially ceramics and obsidian) to an existing GIS that contains only spatial data developed by the Center for Desert Archaeology. This GIS database includes roughly 2000 late prehispanic sites across the Southwest. Second is to characterize the structure and dynamics of social networks in the area during a period of great population flux and pan-regional interconnectivity. The third is to apply new methods and theories of social network analysis from sociology, Geographic Information System (GIS), physics, and mathematics to archaeology. Fourth, researchers are to test current theories about network structure and change using high-resolution archaeological data. And fifth, the researchers are to integrate social network theory with powerful tools of spatial analyses such as GIS. Southwest archaeology has the potential to provide a "deep time" perspective on the rise and fall of social networks within a relatively controlled and circumscribed environment. Social network analysis has largely concentrated on contemporary examples and this is the first application of social network theory and methods to a regional archaeological database that measures change over centuries and that is more analogous to the kinds of interactions that take place in many non-urban settings throughout the world. Project results are presented in a manner accessible to the public in variety of media, including the Center for Desert Archaeology?s website, public lectures, and widely distributed publications.