Community structure of copper supply networks in the prehistoric Balkans: An independent evaluation of the archaeological record from the 7th to the 4th millennium BC

Complex network analyses of many physical, biological and social phenomena show remarkable structural regularities, yet, their application in studying human past interaction remains underdeveloped. Here, we present an innovative method for identifying community structures in the archaeological record that allows for independent evaluation of the copper using societies in the Balkans, from c. 6200 to c. 3200 BC. We achieve this by exploring modularity of networked systems of these societies across an estimated 3000 years. We employ chemical data of copper-based objects from 79 archaeological sites as the independent variable for detecting most densely interconnected sets of nodes with a modularity maximization method. Our results reveal three dominant modular structures across the entire period, which exhibit strong spatial and temporal significance. We interpret patterns of copper supply among prehistoric societies as reflective of social relations, which emerge as equally important as physical proximity. Although designed on a variable isolated from any archaeological and spatiotemporal information, our method provides archaeologically and spatiotemporally meaningful results. It produces models of human interaction and cooperation that can be evaluated independently of established archaeological systematics, and can find wide application on any quantitative data from archaeological and historical record.J.G. and M.R. acknowledge the financial support from McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (project AH/J001406/1) and FWO Research Foundation - Flanders

Program and the Book of Abstracts / Tenth Young Researchers' Conference Materials Science and Engineering, December 21-23, 2011, Belgrade, Serbia

Young Researchers' meetings are held annually late in December since 2002 and they are organized by the Materials Research Society of Serbia. Originally conceived as seminars, since 2007 these meetings were transformed into conferences. The previous ten meetings featured presentations based on the research of various young scientists from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, Brazil, Germany, United States of America, China, Poland, Belgium, Spain, Romania, United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Russia, Canada, etc. At the Conference, young researchers, students of doctoral, master and undergraduate studies, are given the opportunity to make an overview of their research into materials science and engineering through oral and poster presentations.As for the scientific content of the conference, we have given full priority to research topics that are currently considered as being on the frontier of the field. Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Synthesis and Engineering of Biomaterials, Application of Biomaterials, Theoretical Modeling of Materials and Advanced Methods for Synthesis and Processing present only some of those exciting topics that will be given the central stage and most attention during this meeting. The conference is free of charge and the participants are invited to submit their papers to the journals Tehnika – Novi Materijali and Hemijska Industrija.The Tenth Young Researchers' Conference Materials Science and Engineering was held in Belgrade, Serbia on December 21-23, 2011.It was organized by the Materials Research Society of Serbia and Institute of Technical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts