From Metaphors to Practice

Abstract

Practice theoretic approaches to archaeological interpretation aim to solve scalar puzzles of structure and agency by employing a set of metaphors that invoke networked relations between people and things in the past. One recent example of this approach, termed “social stratigraphy,” offers an alternative to analyzing deeply buried and stratified architectural contexts by emphasizing the recursive social and physical actions of construction, which generate webs of human interaction (McAnany and Hodder, Archaeological Dialogues 16(1):1–22, 2009). In order to ensure that such descriptive metaphors align with our empirical observations, archaeologists need to account for the varied ways that social action and architectural practice intersect along multiple axes of variation (i.e., material, spatial, and temporal). By analyzing the interconnected spatial and temporal dimensions of past built environments, this paper suggests that relational concepts can offer more than heuristic functions for archaeological discourse. I offer a set of formal methods related to quantitative social network analyses as one way to operationalize, and thereby strengthen, such metaphors as applied to archaeological interpretation. These techniques are demonstrated using recent excavation data from multiple stratified architectural contexts at a minor temple center located in the Pasion region of the southern Maya lowlands to infer synchronous episodes of construction over a period of 1,600 years (850 bce–850 ce). Results of this study demonstrate that issues of spatiotemporal variability can be resolved at a microscale by formally applying network concepts to archaeological analysis.