The Social Networks of Early Hunter-Gatherers in Midcontinental North America.

Abstract

This dissertation integrates ethnographic information and computational modeling to build theory about hunter-gatherer social networks and the relationships between the characteristics of those networks and patterns of variability in material culture. Key mechanisms of personal network formation (mobility, marriage, and kinship) and social learning are represented in an agent-based model which allows both system-level social networks and large-scale patterns of artifact variability to emerge from the “bottom up” through numerous human-level behaviors and interactions. This model is used to: (1) identify patterned relationships between the human-level behaviors that we can observe ethnographically and the characteristics of the system-level social networks that emerge through those behaviors; and (2) explore how the characteristics of system-level social networks are related to the patterns of variability in items of material culture whose production is mediated through those networks. Comparisons between archaeological artifact assemblages and artifact assemblages produced during model experiments are used to evaluate network-based explanations for the appearance and disappearance of stylistic regions during the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods (ca. 11,050-8000 radiocarbon years before present) in midcontinental North America. These comparisons suggest that the appearance of stylistic regions during the Middle and Late Paleoindian periods was most likely the result of processes of stylistic drift operating across social networks that were less inter-connected than those of the Early Paleoindian period. Decreasing social connectivity across the midcontinent was probably related to an uneven distribution of population as hunter-gatherer individuals, groups, and systems responded to environmental change at the end of the Pleistocene. Population growth and the emergence of relatively homogenous environments at the beginning of the Holocene (ca. 10,000 radiocarbon years before present) would have increased social connectivity and diminished the capacity of drift processes to produce stylistically differentiated regions.

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