Network analysis in archaeology : new approaches to regional interaction / edited by Carl Knappett.

Outgrowth of a session organized for the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in St. Louis, Mo., in 2010. Cf. acknowledgments.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I. Background -- 1. Introduction : why networks? / Carl Knappett -- 2. Social network analysis and the practice of history / John Edward Terrell -- 3. 'O what a tangled web we weave' : towards a practice that does not deceive / Leif Isaksen -- Part II. Sites and Settlements -- 4. Broken links and black boxes : material affiliations and contextual network synthesis in the Viking world / Sren M. Sindbk -- 5. Positioning power in a multi-relational framework : a social network analysis of classic Maya political rhetoric / Jonathan B. Scholnick, Jessica L. Munson, and Martha J. Macri -- 6. What makes a site important? : centrality, gateways, and gravity / Ray Rivers, Carl Knappett, and Tim Evans -- 7. Evolution of prestige good systems : an application of network analysis to the transformation of communication systems and their media / Koji Mizoguchi -- Part III. Material Culture -- 8. The dynamics of social networks in the late Prehispanic U.S. Southwest / Barbara J. Mills, John M. Roberts Jr., Jeffery J. Clark, William R. Haas Jr., Deborah Huntley, Matthew A. Peeples, Lewis Borck, Susan C. Ryan, Meaghan Trowbridge, and Ronald L. Breiger -- 9. Social networks, path dependence, and the rise of ethnic groups in pre-Roman Italy / Emma Blake -- 10. Re-thinking Jewish ethnicity through social network analysis / Anna Collar -- 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) / Fiona Coward -- 12. Evaluating adaptive network strategies with geochemical sourcing data : a case study from the Kuril Islands / Erik Gjesfjeld and S. Colby Phillips -- 13. Old boy networks in the indigenous Caribbean / Angus Mol and Jimmy Mans -- Part IV. -- 14. Archaeology, networks, information processing, and beyond / Sander van der Leeuw.

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.