Reconstructing Inter-regional Interaction Networks in Pre-colonial Nigeria Using Network Analysis

Understanding the structure and dynamics of inter-regional interaction in pre-colonial Nigeria, encompassing trade, craft knowledge exchange, diplomatic alliance, and population movement, requires analytical frameworks capable of capturing the systemic properties of connectivity that elude site-by-site or bilateral comparisons. This dissertation applies network analysis to the reconstruction of inter-regional interaction in pre-colonial Nigeria, developing an original methodological framework for translating material culture co-occurrence and compositional similarity data into formal network structures, and applying this framework to a multi-century dataset spanning the period 800 to 1800 CE. The analytical programme draws on compositional data from glass bead, copper alloy, and ceramic assemblages from forty-two sites across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, generating similarity matrices from which weighted network graphs are constructed using cosine similarity coefficients. Network analysis metrics including degree centrality, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient, and modularity are computed for each time period to characterize network topology and identify highly connected hub sites. Results reveal a dynamic and significantly changing network structure across the study period, with the dominant inter-regional connectors shifting from the Lake Chad corridor and trans-Saharan linkages in the early period to a Yoruba-Benin-Niger Delta triangle in the middle period, and showing increasing Atlantic-oriented connectivity in the later period. These structural changes are theoretically interpreted using world systems theory and network transition models, contributing an original empirical characterization of pre-colonial Nigerian inter-regional dynamics. Keywords: network analysis, inter-regional interaction, pre-colonial Nigeria, material culture, connectivity.