Putting Network Science to Work in Archaeological Research

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to give you the basic lay of the land in the world of archaeological network research in order to provide context for the remainder of the book. As we saw in Chapter 1, although archaeologists have applied graph-theoretic and network analytic methods toward archaeological questions for more than 50 years, it is really only in the last 10 years or so that such approaches have become common. Archaeological network science is still quite a young subdiscipline and is constantly changing. There are likely to be some “growing pains” as we all figure out how to best adopt, adapt, and develop network methods appropriate for archaeological data and archaeological questions. This is perhaps not too different from where specializations like GIS were in archaeology 15–20 years ago (see Connolly and Lake 2006; Wheatley and Gillings 2002).