Researchers studied thousands of ceramic and obsidian
artifacts from A.D. 1200-1450 to learn about the growth, collapse and change of
social networks in the late pre-Hispanic Southwest.
The advent of social networking sites like Facebook and
Twitter have made us all more connected, but long-distance social networks
existed long before the Internet.
An article published this week in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences sheds light on the transformation of social
networks in the late pre-Hispanic American Southwest and shows that people of
that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with
nothing more than their feet to connect them.