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"This paper reports on an attempt to analyse decorative techniques on archaeological pottery from the Middle Niger region of West Africa as knowledge exchange networks. The twelfth-century AD state of this network is modelled and analysed and then compared to its ninth-century counterpart. The analysis shows how knowledge about pottery decoration was propagated within networks of different sizes and intensities, from local, well-connected networks to more loosely tied long-distance connections. The article shows how the perspective of network analysis differs from, and can fruitfully complement, previous treatments of ceramic décor distribution in the region. It adds a novel perspective to what the distribution of archaeological ceramics in this region reflects and contributes to the generation of hypotheses that can be further tested by fieldwork."
From https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2024.2380219?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Construction
"Our theoretical approach to what the network represents informs the way in which the network model is constructed. So far, the most frequent form of making ties in archaeological ceramic data has been by calculating the statistical similarity between assemblages. Hart and Engelbrecht (Citation2012) use the Brainerd-Robinson similarity coefficient, as do, for instance, Mills et al. (Citation2015), while de Groot (Citation2019) uses the Jaccard and Kulczyinski-2 similarity measures. The similarity value is then used as the basis and weight for forming a tie between the two assemblage nodes. Because we did not only want to base our network on overall similarity but also wanted to be able to analyse the networks of individual décors more closely, we have constructed a multiplex network. This is a network in which edges can have different types and can thus be envisaged as having layers. A multiplex network is distinct from a multilayer network, in which connections can also exist between layers, and which has recently seen its first application to archaeological ceramics by Upton (2019). In our multiplex network, each decorative practice is represented as a distinct layer. The layers share the site assemblages as nodes, although not every node is necessarily represented on every layer. The ties are weighted by the product of the percentages of a given décor in two assemblages. This network construction is implemented in R (R Core Team Citation2022) using the tidygraph package (Pedersen Citation2022)."
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