Apologies for cross-posting
Call for papers
We would like to bring the session 'Challenges in
Archaeological Network Science' to your attention. The session will be held at
the Sunbelt Social Network Analysis conference in Brighton on 23-28 June 2015. We welcome all
abstracts that address the challenges mentioned in the session abstract
below.
Please ensure to select the session ‘Challenges in
Archaeological Network Science’ during the submission process. Feel free to
notify us if you decide to submit an abstract.
We look forward to meeting you in Brighton,
Termeh Shafie and Tom Brughmans
---
ABSTRACT
Challenges in Archaeological Network
Science
The application of network analysis in archaeology has only
become more common in the last decade, despite a number of pioneering studies in
the 1960s and 70s. The use of different techniques for the analysis and
visualisation of network data has already led to new insights into past human
behaviour. However, this renewed interest in network science is also accompanied
by an increasing awareness of a number of methodological challenges that
archaeological network scientists are faced with. These include, but are not
limited to the following:
–
How to deal with spurious data?
Sampling strategies in
archaeology are often dominated by the geopolitical and financial constraints of
excavation campaigns. Moreover, differences in the preservation of different
materials provide a very fragmented picture of past human behaviour. As a
result, networks constructed from archaeological data can be very sparse with
apparent uncertainties.
–
How to introduce more complex assumptions concerning tie dependency in the
reconstruction of archaeological networks?
Network modelling is
based on hypotheses from archaeological theory which in turn is based on
archaeological evidence. A major challenge is how to infer the structure of an
archaeological network given a set of assumptions regulating the occurrence of
ties.
–
How to deal with the poor chronological control of archaeological
data?
The
contemporaneity of observations and the exact sequence of events are often
uncertain. This is problematic for network science techniques that assume node
contemporaneity or require knowledge of the order of events.
–
How to consider complex socio-spatial phenomena?
Archaeologists
commonly study the spatial distribution of their data and evaluate to what
extent spatial constraints influenced human behaviour. A limited number of
spatial network techniques are currently available and many of these are not or
hardly applicable in archaeology (e.g. network analysis of road
networks).
This session invites
papers that address these or other methodological challenges that network
scientists in archaeology are faced with.
This session is
organized by and will be chaired by:
Termeh Shafie,
[log in to unmask],
Department of Computer & Information Science, University of
Konstanz.
Tom
Brughmans,
[log in to unmask],
Department of Computer & Information Science, University of
Konstanz.