About
From Categories to Connections
Humans are fundamentally bound to one another in countless webs of relationships, actions, intentions, materials, and being. These relationships give form to our social, political, economic, and cultural institutions, to our lived realities and worlds of experience. The Laboratory for Spatial Archaeology and Historical Network Dynamics at Penn State seeks to explore the network foundations of human organizations and institutions, especially their innumerable, vibrant, and diverse expressions across the globe and throughout our shared history.
Spatial Archaeology. The SAHND Lab continues a long tradition of recognizing the critical, generative, transformative, constraining, multiscalar, and sometimes contentious role of space in giving form to human organization. We leverage a range of geospatial technologies (e.g., GIS, geophysical surveys, etc) to reveal the spatial frameworks of past and present sociopolitical institutions and leverage spatial analyses to track critical transformations to these institutions. From the household, to the community, the region, and the continent, we recognize the connections not only between sociospatial scales, but also seek to illuminate the spaces between and beyond our traditional analytical units.
Historical. All human phenomena are fundamentally historical phenomena. They can be characterized, explored, and explained through their temporalities, rhythms, and relative positions. At the SAHND Lab, time is a key aspect to understanding the evolution of institutions and the networks that give them their forms. Through high-precision AMS dating and Bayesian chronological modeling, we seek to illuminate both long-term trajectories of human organizations as well as the multi-rhythmic temporalities that define their histories, from rapid transformations to long-enduring traditions.
Network Dynamics. The primary focus of the SAHND Lab is the investigation of networks: the human relationships and varied connections that give form to social, political, and economic institutions. We explore the ways that humans have forged, maintained, and transformed networks through time. In particular, the SAHND Lab is concerned with the ways that societies govern themselves; the way they creatively imagine institutions that impose relational rules among its members. An important aspect of this work is to understand how networks, relationships, and connections are leveraged as resources and enable or constrain opportunities for collective action. To these ends, researchers in the SAHND Lab engage diverse, interdisciplinary frameworks from across the social sciences while leveraging archaeological, historical, and contemporary data on human social networks.
