Artifacts tell a story about the growth, collapse, and change of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic Southwest, according to paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the paper, the researchers, including SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset, show that people of that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with nothing more than their feet to connect them.
Led by University of Arizona anthropologist Barbara Mills, the study is based on analysis of more than 800,000 painted ceramic and more than 4,800 obsidian artifacts dating from A.D. 1200-1450, uncovered from more than 700 sites in the western Southwest, in what is now Arizona and western New Mexico.
The researchers used formal social network analysis to determine what the material culture could teach them about how social networks shifted and evolved during a period that saw large-scale demographic changes, including long-distance migration and coalescence of populations into large villages.
Read the paper in PNAS (March 25, 2013)
Read the University of Arizona news release (March 25, 2013)