From the kind of data used, to the creativity of approaches aimed at exploring social networks in the past, applications of social network analysis (SNA) in archaeology are characterized by exceptional diversity. In recent years, applications of SNA by historians and history-adjacent scholars have also increased dramatically, partly as a product of the growing field of digital humanities. In the North American sense of the term, the utility of social network analysis has yet to be substantively realized by historical archaeologists. In this paper, we use two case studies from the southeastern United States to illustrate the potential that social network analyses could offer historical archaeologists. In particular, we highlight how social network analysis can be employed as a framework for the integrated consideration of both archaeological and documentary evidence to explore the distribution, accumulation, control, and production of social capital in the past. In our first case study we leverage archaeological networks as a proxy for social capital to explore the contradictions and complementarity of archaeological data and the ethnohistorical record on the Indigenous politics of sixteenth-century Southern Appalachia. In our second example we examine networks of tasks and spaces across a nineteenth-century enslaved community on the Georgia Coast to understand how social capital can be differentially accumulated and accessed within particular spaces and practices. Through these examples, we demonstrate the potential for social network analysis to enrich the research programs and support the goals of North American historical archaeologists and to link such research into broader themes across the social and humanistic sciences.

从使用的数据类型，到过去旨在探索社交网络的方法的创造性，社交网络分析 (SNA) 在考古学中的应用都具有非凡的多样性。近年来，历史学家和历史相关学者对 SNA 的应用也急剧增加，部分原因是数字人文领域不断发展。在北美意义上，社会网络分析的效用尚未被历史考古学家实质性地实现。在本文中，我们使用来自美国东南部的两个案例研究来说明社交网络分析可以为历史考古学家提供的潜力。特别是，我们强调如何将社交网络分析用作综合考虑考古和文献证据的框架，以探索过去社会资本的分布、积累、控制和生产。在我们的第一个案例研究中，我们利用考古网络作为社会资本的代理来探索考古数据与 16 世纪南阿巴拉契亚土著政治的民族历史记录的矛盾和互补性。在我们的第二个例子中，我们研究了乔治亚海岸 19 世纪被奴役社区的任务和空间网络，以了解社会资本如何在特定空间和实践中不同地积累和获取。通过这些例子，