From cost to conductance: A technique for incorporating social conductance in Least cost analysis

We draw attention to differences in logistic least cost rationales that emphasize the practical conditions that push people toward optimization and social approaches, which emphasize the sociocultural conditions that can pull people away from optimization. To better incorporate the prosocial tendencies of people moving through lived landscapes, we develop a socially informed least cost approach that prioritizes social interactions at known sites without explicitly inputting those places as destinations. To highlight the utility of this technique, we deploy the social approach in a case study of the South Road—an important movement corridor during the Chaco fluorescence (ca. AD 850-1150) in present-day northwestern New Mexico. Results show that a social approach produces travel corridors that more closely resemble the route of the South Road than corridors derived through a logistic approach. The results demonstrate the importance of considering traditionally non-optimal and socially informed motivations when modeling human movement and large-scale transportation in the past.