"Social, political, and economic institutions covary with one another in heterogenous ways across space and time. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a set of analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that have allowed for formal comparisons of interactions, affiliations, and relationships in reconstructing historical trajectories of institutional change. Although archaeologists have made full use of a range of metrics that describe the structural variation of social networks, formal approaches to analyzing the covariance of networks, and the institutions that structured networks in the past, remain undertheorized. In most cases, descriptive metrics are compared between networks built from different datasets or networks separated in time. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) correlations to compare matrices of archaeological data, I draw on a ceramic dataset of approximately 350,000 sherds from the Southern Appalachian region to investigate how decisions related to manufacture choice and to stylistic design covaried with one another between roughly AD 800 and 1650. I explore how material attributes may or may not vary independently of one another and what that means for our analyses of the institutions they reflect. The results contribute to broader comparative analyses of institutional change and perennial discussions of social evolution."
Construction
"The files in this folder contain all of the data used to conduct analyses and produce the figures presented in the above manuscript. There are six datasets included. Each dataset is a matrix of Brainerd-Robinson similarity values for ceramic assemblages from archaeological sites across Southern Appalachia. Three of these matrices are for similarities of temper across these ceramic assemblages assigned to the three time periods considered (T1: AD 800-1050, T2: AD 1050-1325, T3: AD 1325-1650). The other three matrices are for similarities of surface decoration across ceramic assemblages from the same sites assigned to the three time periods considered.
The data are included in two forms. Each matrix is included as a .csv file and as a UCINET file. The UCINET files are comprised of two parts, a ##d file and an ##h file. Both are required to open the datasets in UCINET and in NetDraw (UCINET’s visualization component)." "“The Southern Appalachian Social Networks Project was designed and undertaken to explore long-term changes to social and political networks across the Southern Appalachian region of northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee between approximately AD 800 and 1650. Networks were built from ceramic data (described below) from roughly 100 Ancestral Muskogean towns to assess different kinds of social capital that underwrote regional politics. Using a matrix of Brainerd–Robinson values representing similarities between ceramic assemblages at the component level, network graphs were produced. All of the network measures were calculated using weighted data—the actual Brainerd–Robinson values for each matrix. All matrices used to produce the networks, metrics, and figures are provided as both .csv and UCINET files, archived at Zenodo (Holland-Lulewicz 2023). Analyses and visualizations were produced using UCINET (Borgatti et al. 2002).”
Holland-Lulewicz. (2023). Supplemental Material for Manuscript: The Heterogeneity of Social Network and Institutional Covariance in the American Southeast [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7900872
Borgatti, Stephen P., Everett, Martin G., and Freeman, Linton C.. 2002. UCINET for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis. Analytic Technologies, Harvard, Massachusetts. https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/home, accessed August 11, 2023.