Social networks and community features: Identifying neighborhoods in a WWII Japanese American incarceration center

Abstract

Socially defined neighborhoods develop through frequent face to face interactions among residents and their self-identification as neighbors. While archaeological evidence of neighborhoods is usually dependent on artifact frequencies, boundaries, or shared features, this paper explores how effectively communal features act as proxies for social interactions. Network data drawn from historic newspapers published by incarcerees at Amache, a WWII Japanese American Incarceration Center, is used to recreate networks of interaction between residents of a block – a spatial unit generally viewed as a neighborhood, that housed between 200 and 350 individuals. Within a sample of surveyed residential areas, these interpersonal networks of published social events are compared to the frequency of community landscape features to see how well archaeological remains correspond to historic network data in identifying socially defined neighborhoods archaeologically. All blocks exhibit neighborhood-like social interaction within one or the other dataset, but not always in both suggesting that archaeological research should test multiple datasets to make more robust interpretations about neighborhoods in the past.