Book contents
- Network Science in Archaeology
- Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology
- Network Science in Archaeology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Tables
- Boxes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to the Online Resources Associated with This Book
- 1 Introducing Network Science for Archaeology
- 2 Putting Network Science to Work in Archaeological Research
- 3 Network Data
- 4 Exploratory Network Analysis
- 5 Quantifying Uncertainty in Archaeological Networks
- 6 Network Visualization
- 7 Spatial Networks and Networks in Space
- 8 Uniting Theory and Method for Archaeological Network Research
- Book part
- Glossary
- References
- Index
- References
7 - Spatial Networks and Networks in Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2023
- Network Science in Archaeology
- Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology
- Network Science in Archaeology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Tables
- Boxes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to the Online Resources Associated with This Book
- 1 Introducing Network Science for Archaeology
- 2 Putting Network Science to Work in Archaeological Research
- 3 Network Data
- 4 Exploratory Network Analysis
- 5 Quantifying Uncertainty in Archaeological Networks
- 6 Network Visualization
- 7 Spatial Networks and Networks in Space
- 8 Uniting Theory and Method for Archaeological Network Research
- Book part
- Glossary
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
Most of the past phenomena we study as archaeologists took place in physical space: individuals lived in homes and towns, and they moved through landscapes; they fought wars on battlefields and they exchanged goods from faraway places. Through our excavations, fieldwork, and literature studies we record spatial information such as the outlines of houses, the locations of sites, the slopes of terrain, or the distance between natural resources and settlements. Many relational phenomena are explicitly geographical, in that the medium of geographical space is an important aspect of the relationship itself. For example, road segments connect pairs of settlements that are close together, and lines of sight connect places from which observers can see features. Such phenomena could be quite straightforwardly represented as spatial networks since the nodes and edges are both explicitly embedded in physical space. But for other relational phenomena, space is more like a background feature that can be brought into analyses when relevant but does not feature prominently in the definition of either nodes or edges. For example, past food webs where species are connected through trophic flows or social networks where individuals are connected to their contacts both involve entities (nodes) and relationships (edges) that have spatial properties or attributes, but those spatial properties are not directly invoked in the definition of such networks. We refer to these as networks in space in that we could include spatial features into their network representations, but this is not explicitly included in their definition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Network Science in Archaeology , pp. 237 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
References
Further Reading
The following are in-depth overviews of spatial network approaches.
The following are overviews and introductions to spatial network methods used in archaeology.
Concerning geographical network visualization, see the following websites.
https://geographic-networks.github.io/poster.pdf
With abstract:
https://geographic-networks.github.io/abstract.pdf
And comprehensive website: