Reconstructing mesolithic social networks in the Iberian Peninsula using ornaments

A peer-reviewed version of this manuscript has been published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (see https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-022-01641-z). Archaeologists have been reconstructing interactions among hunter-gatherer populations for a long time. These exchanges are reflected in the movements of raw materials and symbolic objects which are found far from their original sources. A social network, i.e., the structure constituted by these interactions, is a well-established concept in archaeology that is used to estimate the connectivity of hunter-gatherer populations. The heuristic potential of formal network analysis, however, has been scarcely exploited in prehistoric hunter-gatherer archaeology. In this work, we use Social Network Analysis to analyse the interactions among hunter-gatherers on the Iberian Peninsula in the Early and Late Mesolithic (10.200 to 7600 cal BP). Ornaments are accepted markers of non-utilitarian mobility and exchange. We thus used ornaments as proxies for social interaction and constructed one network for each phase of the Iberian Mesolithic. We applied three levels of analysis: first, we characterised the overall structure of the networks. Second, we performed node-level analysis to uncover the most relevant nodes in each network. Finally, we conducted an exploratory analysis of the networks’ spatial characteristics. No significant differences were found between the overall network topology of the Early and Late Mesolithic. This suggests that the interaction patterns among human groups did not change significantly on the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, the spatial analysis showed that most interactions between human groups took place over distances under 300 km, but that specific ornament types such as C. rustica and Trivia sp. were distributed over more extensive distances. To summarise, our findings suggest that Iberian Mesolithic social networks were maintained through a period of environmental, demographic, and cultural transformation. In addition, the interactions took place at different scales of social integration.