Past Social Network Reconstruction from Material Culture Data

This data-driven project aims to bring archaeologists and network researchers together to develop a new way of reconstructing ancient social networks. The majority of our knowledge about human history is based on historical and physical sources such as stones, bones, and ceramics. Archaeologists use these sources to understand how people in the past interacted with each other. However, this is not a straightforward process, as how can a couple of clay jars tell us something about a social relationship between two long-deceased individuals? This is precisely what the research project aims to develop new methods for visualising.

Although archaeological network research has evolved into a well-established field of research, there is a lack of dedicated methods and tools purpose-built to address the challenges of material culture data or to express the implications of archaeological theory. This project aims to create the first of these methods.

Role of Center for Humanities Computing  

CHC will provide technical support for the project as we are tasked with the job of developing new computational archaeological data analysis methods. It is expected that this project will result in a new method that will structure archaeologists’ efforts to reconstruct past social networks from material remains.