Connected Communities: Networks, Identity, and Social Change in the Ancient Cibola World

For more than a century, the Cibola region on the Arizona–New Mexico border has been the focus of archaeological interest. The core of the region is recognized as the ancestral homeland of the contemporary Zuni people, and the area also spans boundaries between the Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon culture areas. The complexity of cross-cutting regional and cultural designations make this an ideal context within which to explore the relationship between identity and social change at broad regional scales. In Connected Communities, Matthew A. Peeples examines archaeological data generated during a century of research through the lens of new and original social theories and methods focused on exploring identity, social networks, and social transformation. In so doing, he demonstrates the value of comparative, synthetic analysis. The book addresses some of the oldest enduring questions in archaeology: How do large-scale social identities form? How do they change? How can we study such processes using material remains? Peeples approaches these questions using a new set of methods and models from the broader comparative social sciences (relational sociology and social networks) to track the trajectories of social groups in terms of both networks of interactions (relations) and expressions of similarity or difference (categories). He argues that these different kinds of social identity have too often been conflated in archaeological research, and that this has hindered efforts to understand the drivers of social change. In his strikingly original approach, Peeples combines massive amounts of new data and comparative explorations of contemporary social movements to provide new insights into how social identities formed and changed during a period of dramatic social and political transformation in the prehistoric Cibola region (ca. A.D. 1150–1325).

About the Author :
Matthew A. Peeples is an assistant professor of anthropology and the research director of the Center for Archaeology and Society in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

Review :
Peeples, one of the brightest emerging scholars in archaeology, examines decades of high-quality archaeological research in the Cibola region through a new and original use of theories of identity, social networks, and social transformation, demonstrating the added value of comparative, synthetic analysis."" - Judith A. Habicht Mauche, University of California, Santa Cruz ""Network thinking is one of the most exciting recent developments in archaeology, and nowhere has it been more productively applied than in the U.S. Southwest. Here Peeples continues this emergent tradition with a most impressive book-length treatment that every archaeologist interested in social networks will want to read."" - Carl Knappett, University of Toronto ""A major contribution to Southwest archaeology, theories of identity, and network analysis. Peeples uses multiple ways of connecting people in the past, including artifacts and architecture, to show the layered nature of relationships."" - Barbara J. Mills, University of Arizona