Traveling across archaeological landscapes with the hierarchical communication network

Least cost path analysis allows calculating the most cost-efficient way to reach a specific destination from a defined origin. But in archaeological contexts, where only partial data are available regarding the distribution of the sites, least cost paths can only offer limited insights into general patterns of movement. Furthermore, least cost path analysis assumes that each pair of sites was connected through a direct route, which was certainly not the case. In order to cope with such issues, GIS specialists such as Llobera, Murrieta-Flores, and Verhagen have approached accessibility and movement in a less archaeologically constrained manner, by attempting to model regional mobility potential instead of tracing discrete paths between known archaeological sites (Llobera 2000; Murrieta-Flores 2012; Verhagen 2013). Using Early Bronze Age south-central Crete as a case-study, this paper proposes to split the difference between cost surface analyses that are strictly constrained by the location of recorded archaeological sites and those that disregard available cultural data in the course of the computational process. It builds on the recently developed focal mobility network procedure (Fábrega-Álvarez 2006; Llobera, Fábrega-Álvarez and Parcero-Oubiña 2011) to model what can described as a hierarchical communication network – i.e. a network in which the paths are ranked according to the relative importance they seem to have played in connecting the communities established in south-central Crete during the Early Bronze Age