Prehistoric exchange and signalling networks

This page has no manuscripts, no inscriptions, and no documents of any kind to draw on -- the societies in question left nothing in writing, so every conjecture here has to reconstruct a network purely from objects and terrain. Baltic amber can be chemically traced well enough to map its hand-to-hand journey all the way to Mediterranean shores; some Iron Age hillforts were positioned so that neighbouring forts stayed visible to one another; obsidian and other traded goods travelled along routes no scribe ever wrote down. The mathematics for testing these traces comes from physics and network theory -- equations describing how a substance spreads, graph models of what counts as a genuine sightline network -- while the coordinates and dates come from archaeology itself.

Amber advection treats amber's spread from the Baltic to the Mediterranean as a diffusion process with a measurable direction and rate, sourced by chemical fingerprinting rather than any text. Hillfort mesh networks tests whether Iron Age hillforts were sited so as to form a genuine intervisibility network, a deliberate signalling mesh, rather than simply defensible high ground chosen independently of one another.