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In the late 13th century, the American southwest was hit by a major drought. When resources were exhausted and agriculture failed, some groups of people were forced to migrate out of the region. Entire areas of northern Arizona were depopulated.

Other groups also survived by turning outward, but not to a new home. Instead, they reached out to neighboring communities and formed social networks across greater distances. These networks created a support system for people in the region to rely upon for their livelihood. And they allowed cultures, such as the Hopi, to persist in a time of crisis.

A recent University of Arizonastudyfound evidence of these networks in hundreds of thousands of ceramic and obsidian objects from archaeological sites in parts of pre-Columbian Arizona and New Mexico. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, the university and a Tucson-based organization called Archaeology Southwest made a joint effort to catalogue the objects in the Southwest Social Network database, a digital archaeological archive.

Researchers examined objects in the database from 1200-1450, and found that there was a high proportion of objects with similar styles of production across hundreds of locations. This suggested that not only were goods exchanged, but the skills required to reproduce those goods were spread across the region and transferred between generations.

What was novel about this study was that we were actually able to demonstrate not just that people used social connection, but how people changed their networks through crisis management, says Lewis Borck, a University of Arizona researcher who co-authored the study. People were finding communities that were farther away.

An upcoming paper that details the results of the study says that the findings are useful for understanding disaster response in modern times as well.

Social networks are incredibly important in understanding how people survive hard times whether natural disasters or conflicts saidElizabeth Ferris, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of theBrookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement. For example, about 80 percent of those who are pulled out of the rubble after earthquakes are saved by neighbors and local groups.

The study also takes on a broader understanding of social network to include the relationships formed between large communities, like when community networks in the American southwest resembled interstate relations.

Were looking at how a community or multiple communities are going to draw from each other, said Borck. You might look at it in terms of how some insular governments or insular countries will have a harder time during a crisis, whereas countries in the EU or the US will have more help.

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Ancient ceramics show skill sharing, social networking in pre-Columbian era