Identifying Late Chalcolithic & Early Bronze Age Metal Communities of Anatolia
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-09-30

There are two broad methodological approaches for identifying distinct communities in the archaeological record: groups and networks. Grouping methods divide objects into categories based on observed similarities, while networks map connections between objects. Archaeologists working in Europe have been advancing methods of both approaches, including Typenspektren to define groups without losing sight of the often fuzzy boundaries between them (Nakoinz 2013) and applying modularity maximization to network analysis (Radivojević and Grujić 2017). This paper applies and compares these new methods from both approaches and correspondence analysis to Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age copper-based objects from Anatolia, for which metal compositional analysis are currently available. The resultant spatial clusters have implications for understanding regional and interregional patterns of production and exchange at a time when copper-using complex societies were first emerging in Anatolia. The remarkable abundance in Anatolia of poly-metallic ore deposits – including copper, iron, silver and lead - contributed to the early appearance - by the mid-4th millennium BC - of a wide range of copper-based alloys. These have been interpreted as resulting from different regionalised technological traditions, which possibly reflect large-scale interaction networks of production and exchange (Lehner and Yener 2014). Therefore, applying the grouping and network methods to the Anatolian data could enable to independently assess this archaeological interpretation and thus enhance our understanding of the socioeconomic structures and relations underlying the production, exchange and use of copper-based objects during the period under examination.

Full title: Identifying Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Metal Communities of Anatolia through Groups and Networks

(Martina Massimino, Michelle de Gruchy, Jelena Grujić, Miljana Radivojević)