It is well recognized that time-averaging of archaeological deposits results in significant biases in interpretations of the archaeological record. In this study, we investigate the biases introduced by time-averaging in the study of social and economic networks from the archaeological record. Using three different archaeological network datasets, we combine network slices from multiple periods to mimic the effects of time-averaging to understand how the palimpsest nature of the archaeological record affects our interpretations of the network. The results of our analysis indicate that time-averaging reduces the fidelity of network interpretations compared to the non-time-averaged networks when analyzing network or node properties. Our results also showed that the effects of time-averaging are highly dependent on initial network structures. This makes it difficult to establish general rules for how to interpret time-averaged networks in archaeology. However, our study shows that it is of paramount importance that archaeologists are aware of these biases and evaluate the reliability of their data accordingly.

众所周知，考古沉积物的时间平均会导致考古记录的解释出现重大偏差。在这项研究中，我们调查了考古记录中的社会和经济网络研究中时间平均带来的偏差。使用三个不同的考古网络数据集，我们结合多个时期的网络切片来模拟时间平均的效果，以了解考古记录的重写性质如何影响我们对网络的解释。我们的分析结果表明，在分析网络或节点属性时，与非时间平均网络相比，时间平均降低了网络解释的保真度。我们的结果还表明，时间平均的效果高度依赖于初始网络结构。这使得很难建立如何解释考古学中的时间平均网络的一般规则。然而，我们的研究表明，考古学家意识到这些偏见并相应地评估其数据的可靠性是至关重要的。