Geochemical Networks

Abstract

Abstract Provenance studies of archaeological materials and formal structural modeling of prehistoric exchange developed hand-in-hand during the 1960s and 70s. While network methods were first applied to archaeometric data during the 1970s, it was only when networks gained in archaeological popularity during the 2000s that the increasing amount of geochemical data available to archaeology was again analyzed using methods and concepts drawn from network science. Most such studies directly infer the structure of prehistoric exchange from the presence of shared material compositional types at archaeological sites. Validation of models produced from theoretical expectations has been rarer, yet represents a promising avenue of further linking geochemical data to higher-level theory. Alternatively, improvements in archaeometric methods may help in understanding how to interpret edges in archaeological networks produced by other means.