Matthew A. Peeples – författare

Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work for archaeological network research, featuring current topical trends and covering the archaeological application of network methods and theories. This is elaborately demonstrated through substantive topics and case studies drawn from a breadth of periods and cultures in world archaeology. It highlights and further develops the unique contributions made by archaeological research to network science, especially concerning the development of spatial and material culture network methods and approaches to studying long-term network change. This is the go-to resource for students and scholars wishing to explore how network science can be applied in archaeology through an up-to-date overview of the field.

For more than a century, the Cibola region on the Arizona–New Mexico border has been the focus of archaeological interest. The core of the region is recognized as the ancestral homeland of the contemporary Zuni people, and the area also spans boundaries between the Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon culture areas. The complexity of cross-cutting regional and cultural designations make this an ideal context within which to explore the relationship between identity and social change at broad regional scales.In Connected Communities, Matthew A. Peeples examines archaeological data generated during a century of research through the lens of new and original social theories and methods focused on exploring identity, social networks, and social transformation. In so doing, he demonstrates the value of comparative, synthetic analysis.The book addresses some of the oldest enduring questions in archaeology: How do large-scale social identities form? How do they change? How can we study such processes using material remains? Peeples approaches these questions using a new set of methods and models from the broader comparative social sciences (relational sociology and social networks) to track the trajectories of social groups in terms of both networks of interactions (relations) and expressions of similarity or difference (categories). He argues that these different kinds of social identity have too often been conflated in archaeological research, and that this has hindered efforts to understand the drivers of social change.In his strikingly original approach, Peeples combines massive amounts of new data and comparative explorations of contemporary social movements to provide new insights into how social identities formed and changed during a period of dramatic social and political transformation in the prehistoric Cibola region (ca. A.D. 1150–1325).

The Cambridge Manual to Archaeological Network Science provides the first comprehensive guide to a field of research that has firmly established itself within archaeological practice in recent years. Network science methods are commonly used to explore big archaeological datasets and are essential for the formal study of past relational phenomena: social networks, transport systems, communication, and exchange. The volume offers a step-by-step description of network science methods and explores its theoretical foundations and applications in archaeological research, which are elaborately illustrated with archaeological examples. It also covers a vast range of network science techniques that can enhance archaeological research, including network data collection and management, exploratory network analysis, sampling issues and sensitivity analysis, spatial networks, and network visualisation. An essential reference handbook for both beginning and experienced archaeological network researchers, the volume includes boxes with definitions, boxed examples, exercises, and online supplementary learning and teaching materials.