ABSTRACT
With its focus on relational structures, network analysis has the potential to greatly facilitate the study of social processes that underlie the material record as passed down to today’s archaeologists. Yet translating the complexity of human interactions into network abstractions can prove challenging. This chapter presents one such interaction, namely the processes of the construction and negotiation of elite identities in late Urnfield graves. It then discusses a way to model the selection of social identities for burial with the help of Alfred Gell’s Strathernograms and presents three possible ways to introduce the relationships uncovered into network models: the addition of node or edge attributes; the creation of complementary networks; and the use of three-mode networks.
