This Master’s thesis documents and interrogates networks of regional interaction
in southwest Asia and Anatolia during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (12,000 -
5700 B.P.) by comparing the variable use of obsidian raw material variants at 151 sites.
This represents an effort to bring together all of the obsidian sourcing data produced for
this broad archaeological setting, and evaluate it from a heterarchical approach that
highlights the distributed nature of regional interaction. Heterarchical perspectives are
applied here through the use of network analysis in order to highlight clusters of sites that
are more connected to each other than they are to others in the system, and to determine
the roles of each site in the system’s overall structure. As such, order is highlighted as a
result of the organization of data-driven ties among sites, which are unrestricted by
presumptions relating to geographical position or of pre-defined rank. The results are
compared with more established models of regional interaction in the settings of interest,
and heterarchical perspectives through network analysis are shown to complement
common understandings of broad-scale connectivity at various points in time. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16528 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Batist, Zachary |
| Contributors | Carter, Tristan, Anthropology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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