Tracing Teams, Texts, and Topics: Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand Archaeological Knowledge Production at Çatalhöyük

Social network analysis (SNA) is an analytical technique rapidly gaining popularity within archaeology for its applicability to a wide variety of issues relating to past communities. Using the 20-year project at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, as a case study, I demonstrate how SNA can be helpfully used to understand knowledge production in archaeology. Balancing network visualization and computation with contextual knowledge, combining SNA with topic modeling, and concentrating on social structures all work to provide a diachronic view of how information flows between disparate research teams at Çatalhöyük as well as the social structures and specific individuals promoting this flow. SNA has the undeniable potential to provide new perspectives on how dispersed datasets are assembled to produce archaeological knowledge, illustrating the value of retaining focus on the social conditions of scientific practice even as significant insights are being derived from instead investigating objects and ontology.