Hunter-gatherer mobility patterns influence the reconstruction of social networks from archaeological assemblages

Hunter-gatherer mobility patterns are extremely variable across the world and through time, in ways that have been shown to profoundly affect, among other things, cultural dynamics throughout our species’ evolutionary history. Unlike studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, where culture and social interactions can be sampled separately, the archaeological record is the product of a social system in the past which we cannot directly observe. Yet, methods derived from the analyses of social networks have been increasingly used to make inferences about patterns of past social interactions using archaeological material as a proxy. It remains a question whether networks built from material cultural remains are indeed representative of the social processes that created them. Here, we use the ArchMatNet agent-based model to investigate how variability in hunter-gatherer mobility patterns and social organization affect our ability to reconstruct prehistoric social networks from artefact stylistic similarities. We find that variability in daily mobility, seasonal aggregations and patterns of migration have profound effects on our ability to recover social networks from archaeological assemblages. Moreover, that several metrics commonly used in SNA should not be interpreted in the same manner when applied to networks built from archaeological datasets. Our results highlight the fact that the archaeological record is the product of social interactions rather than analogous to them. Moreover, it points at a need to better understand the role of mobility in shaping human evolutionary patterns.