Network Model Construction and Evolution of Prehistoric Archaeological Cultures Based on Textual Data of Archaeological Sites—Taking Neolithic Archaeological Sites in Circum-Taihu Lake Region in China as an Example

Archaeological culture reflects ancient human activities and cultural characteristics in a certain time and space, and its evolution process is of great significance to archaeological research and the exploration of civilization. In this paper, we took the Taihu Lake region in the lower Yangtze River of China during the Neolithic period as the research area (Fig.1). Based on the site information automatically obtained from the corresponding Chinese archaeological text data by the information extraction method in this research area, we adopted the complex network analysis method and constructed the network model for the four consecutive archaeological cultures of Majiabang, Songze, Liangzhu, and Maqiao, respectively, with the parameters of the cost distance between the sites calculated taking into account the topographical factors of the slope, undulation, etc.(Fig.2) The structural characteristics of prehistoric societies in the four different periods were deeply explored from three aspects: small-worldness, network accessibility and network stability. The law and trend of regional cultural evolution were analyzed. The results are as follows: (1) The Neolithic cultures of the circum-Taihu region as a whole exhibit the property of small-worldness, suggesting that prehistoric societies showed a homogeneous and uniform pattern of connections in the overall region. (2) The network structure of sites from Majiabang to Liangzhu period showed a tight and stable evolution trend. However, from Liangzhu to Maqiao period, the cultural development began to decline, showing signs of entering a depression. The archaeological cultural network model proposed in this paper provides a new way of thinking for quantitatively understanding the social structure and evolutionary laws of early human societies around the Taihu Lake area, and provides a quantitative analysis method for exploring the characteristics and laws of regional cultural evolution, and promotes scientific archaeological research by providing an important method.

Keywords：Taihu Lake in China; Neolithic period; Complex network model; Archaeological culture; Culture evolution

Fig.1 Schematic diagram of the area around Taihu Lake

Fig.2 Spatial structure network of archaeological sites (a) Majiabang culture; (b) Songze culture; (c) Liangzhu culture; (d) Maqiao culture