Sardinian Obsidian Circulation and Early Maritime Navigation in the Neolithic as Shown Through Social Network Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars typically argue that cultural interaction between the West Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica and the European mainland took place through the Tuscan Archipelago, via such intermediary islands as Elba and Pianosa. This path is posited as the prime route in and out of these islands for both people and objects throughout prehistory largely due to the belief that early—pre-sail—seafarers would have wished to avoid more treacherous open-sea voyages. This article tests this hypothesis using social network analysis (SNA) to identify the strengths of inter-site relationships through time based on the relative proportions of West Mediterranean obsidian raw materials at 79 Neolithic sites dating from the sixth to fourth millennia BC. We argue that similar patterns of obsidian consumption reflect similar procurement mechanisms and the likelihood of more frequent interactions between the people of these communities. As such, it becomes possible to reconstruct the relationships that mediated the distribution of obsidian across the landscape. Contrary to previous interpretations highlighting the role of Elba and Pianosa in the exchange of obsidian from the geological sources of Sardinia along the coast to northern Italy and France, our results suggest that obsidian also took a more direct open-sea path upwards of 200 km from Corsica to the coastal regions of Provence and Languedoc in southern France. These results are contextualized within broader patterns of obsidian circulation and use and have important implications for debates surrounding Neolithic obsidian procurement, exchange spheres, and early maritime navigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".