“Slow” Network Research? A Mixed-Methods Approach Towards Funeral Status Representation in the Late Urnfield Period

Abstract

From its earliest stages on, the rise of computational approaches in the humanities—whether in archaeology, history, or digital humanities more generally—has been accompanied by discussions and critical reflections on the way in which data-driven research methods are informed by the representation of research objects as data structures. Various dimensions, challenges, and characteristics can be roughly divided into three intersecting aspects: the subjectivity of data, their complexity, and their size. Archaeological network analysis as a formal, quantitative method is situated firmly within the tension between these fields, and many authors focus on the application of network research to archaeological data while respecting their complex nature. This paper adds to this growing body of work by focusing on the specificities of a medium-sized data set that offers multiple perspectives on a complex question of social archaeology: the study of intersecting social identities and their materialisation in funeral assemblages, particularly of a collective identity of high status-individuals or “elites”, during the Late Urnfield Period. It offers a mixed-methods approach that centres quantitative results and qualitative contextualization across different scales, and minimises loss of information and context, while transparently disclosing its practices of data selection, pre-processing, and analysis. In doing so, it aims to make the reflective positionings of “slow data” and “slow technology” productive for a methodology of “slow networks”.