Postdoctoral Position in Archaeological Network Research at the Social Resilience Lab

The Social Resilience Lab and the School of Culture and Society invite applications for a 22-month fixed-term postdoctoral position in Archaeological Network Research. The appointment begins on the 1st of November 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Research context

We are looking for an innovative scholar with a background in archaeology, history or digital humanities preferably with a specialisation in network research or the digital analysis of synthesised material culture datasets. 

The position is associated with the Villum Foundation Synergy project ROMNET, which aims to develop methodological tools to support the archaeological practice of creating material culture similarity networks.

This data-driven project establishes interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists (AU) and network scientists (Dr Michele Coscia, IT University Copenhagen) to create the first integrated computational workflow for reconstructing past social networks from material culture data. It will enhance archaeological method and theory for network data representation of material culture data and for testing assumptions about how this data reflects past social networks. It will also enrich network science: archaeology provides network data with critical incompleteness issues but that is also rich in metadata. The project will enable studies on the diversity of social networks of our species, and how processes evolve over long time periods beyond the scope of current social network studies.

The successful applicant is expected to participate in project activities related to archaeological theory, data collection and analysis, and will actively collaborate closely with other team members in developing new methods. They will be mainly supported by the AU PI Tom Brughmans, and will work closely with the ITU PI and postdoctoral researcher. They will further be working along other members of the Social Resilience Lab. 

The position

The employment concerns the following main tasks:

• Archaeology literature review of approaches to network representation of material culture networks, with a particular focus on Roman Studies and the PreHispanic US Southwest
• Systematic description of archaeological transformation steps from ceramic data to network data, the network methods typically used, and the uncertainties and errors involved
• Collection of Roman and prehispanic USSW ceramic data from large open databases; collaboration on datasets with project members
• Application of diverse network representation approaches to ceramic data to inform the development of new method workflow
• Literature review and categorization of archaeological assumptions about the way in which material culture similarity reflects past social networks, supplemented by reviewing ethnographic and sociological studies with the same focus on material culture
• Systematic description of the network methods argued to implement these assumptions typically used by archaeologists to analyse ceramic data networks
• Application of these traditional archaeological approaches to inform new method workflow
• Closely collaborate with archaeology project members in AU and computer science project members at ITU
• Attend and actively participate in inperson project meetings, including project travel
• Actively participate in remote project meetings
• Present their research at international meetings
• Publication of project outputs in peerreviewed international journals, and open access code and data
• Contribute to the organisation of research workshops and international conferences

Deadline
15 September 2024

Please read the full job description and apply at the university homepage

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