Title: Community structure of copper supply networks in the prehistoric Balkans: An independent evaluation of the archaeological record from the 7th to the 4th millennium BC,
Abstract: Complex networks analyses of many physical, biological and social phenomena
show remarkable structural regularities, yet, their application in studying
human past interaction remains underdeveloped. Here, we present an innovative
method for identifying community structures in the archaeological record that
allow for independent evaluation of the copper using societies in the Balkans,
from c. 6200 to c. 3200 BC. We achieve this by exploring modularity of
networked systems of these societies across an estimated 3000 years. We employ
chemical data of copper-based objects from 79 archaeological sites as the
independent variable for detecting most densely interconnected sets of nodes
with a modularity maximization method. Our results reveal three dominant
modular structures across the entire period, which exhibit strong spatial and
temporal significance. We interpret patterns of copper supply among prehistoric
societies as reflective of social relations, which emerge as equally important
as physical proximity. Although designed on a variable isolated from any
archaeological and spatiotemporal information, our method provides
archaeologically and spatiotemporally meaningful results. It produces models of
human interaction and cooperation that can be evaluated independently of
established archaeological systematics, and can find wide application on any
quantitative data from archaeological and historical record.