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"Storing information and circulating it between individuals and groups is a critical behaviour that signals a tipping point in our evolutionary history. Such practices enabled the preservation and consolidation of knowledge over extended periods, facilitating the accumulation of cultural innovations across generations. In this study, we used Social Network Analysis methods to explore how knowledge circulated during the transition to agriculture in the Western Mediterranean region. Previous studies have shown that specific elements of the material culture reveal distinct patterns of cultural interaction among early farming communities. Here, we investigated if two archaeological proxies, personal ornaments and pottery decorations, both with an exclusively symbolic function, reveal different network structures, and if the different degree of connexions acted equally on the transmission of styles, symbols, and network changes over time. Our results relied on cultural data recorded from 77 archaeological occupations covering Italy, France, and Spain, spanning over 1,500 years (ca. 7950~6450 cal BP). By utilizing a chronological dataset comprising 114 radiocarbon dates, we revealed that pottery decorative techniques networks exhibited stronger connexions over space and time, with nodes organized in clear cluster, when compared to personal ornaments networks. The findings highlight the regionalization and fragmentation of cultural networks during the Early Neolithic, and that the transmission of cultural traits within each category of artefact operated through varying cultural and social mechanisms. Pottery expressed a dynamic regional identity, continuously shaped by geographical and chronological proximity, while bead-type associations contributed to enduring identities shared across vast geographical scales. These networks shed light on the multifaceted shaping of social and symbolic capital among the Mediterranean’s early farmers, emphasizing the strength and quality of social ties that existed between communities and the level of reciprocity and cooperation required to foster these diverse social, economic, and cultural development strategies."
From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10631656/#sec026
Construction
"Our sample is constituted of two previously published datasets [1]: pottery decorative
techniques count data and bead-type association presence/absence data.
The Brainerd-Robinson (BR) coefficient of similarity [2–4] is commonly used in
archaeology [5–7] and more specifically for pairwise comparisons of count data. In this study,
we use a rescaled version of the BR [4,8,9], outputted in the interval [0, 1] (worksheet A in S2
Supplementary Information), to build the pottery decorative techniques similarity matrix. The
Jaccard similarity index [10,11] is another commonly used index in archaeology [1,12] , more
specifically for the pairwise comparison of presence/absence data. This index outputs results
in the interval [0, 1] (worksheet G in S2 Supplementary Information) [4,10,11,13] and was used
to build the personal ornaments similarity matrix. "
"All the statistics presented above were calculated in the R platform [19] using an adapted and extended version of the code presented by Brughmans and Peeples [8,9,20]. All the statistics were performed, except when indicated otherwise, using the threshold matrices. In the main body, for brevity, we refer to the centralities without making reference to them being weighted, even though all calculations were made as such. The code can be found in S1 Code."
See PDF attached to the Supplementary Material.