The roots of the Columbian Exchange: an entanglement and network approach to early Caribbean encounter transactions.

The colonization of the Caribbean initiated a process of entanglement of people, goods, and ideas between the "New" and "Old World," which is popularly referred to as the Columbian Exchange. This paper seeks to highlight the multiscalar and material underpinnings of this process of global importance by tracing it to its roots: the earliest encounters between the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and European colonists. We present a database, based on key Spanish historical sources, which catalogs all references to the transaction of objects between Amerindians and Europeans from AD 1492-1497.

A Framework for Reconstructing Archaeological Networks Using Exponential Random Graph Models.

Reconstructing ties between archaeological contexts may contribute to explain and describe a variety of past social phenomena. Several models have been formulated to infer the structure of such archaeological networks. The applicability of these models in diverse archaeological contexts is limited by the restricted set of assumptions that fully determine the mathematical formulation of the models and are often articulated on a dyadic basis.