The following is an article excerpt from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By Elizabeth Lunday
More than a thousand years ago, women living in today’s northern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee formed networks of relationships that extended across these geographic regions and lasted for centuries. These relationships endured despite political turmoil in their society, providing their participants with a sense of stability and continuity.
That’s the picture painted by archaeologist Jacob Lulewicz of Washington University in St. Louis, who recently published a paper to this effect in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lulewicz employed social network analysis, a method of studying the structure of social relationships, to arrive at this conclusion. Originally developed in the 1930s by psychologists, social network analysis has become an important tool in fields as disparate as computer science and economics, history and epidemiology.
It might sound like an obscure social science technique, but the public is now familiar with the concepts underlying social network analysis. In the 1990s, many people became fascinated with the idea of “six degrees of separation” that proposes any two people in the world are linked by six or fewer social connections. Then in the 2000s, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter became ubiquitous. Archaeologists have discovered that social network analysis also has the potential to answer questions about the past, and Lulewicz is using it to look at the Mississippian people of Southern Appalachia from a new perspective.
“Lulewicz is elegantly showing us how to document relationships between Mississippian societies in the Southeast, focusing on common artifacts made and used by most people, and not just the elaborate artifacts used by a few elites,” said archaeologist David Anderson, a Mississippian expert at the University of Tennessee. “As such, he is showing us new ways to explore life in the past that I predict will be widely adopted across the Southeast in the years to come.”
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