Social, political, and economic institutions covary with one another in heterogenous ways across space and time. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a set of analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that have allowed for formal comparisons of interactions, affiliations, and relationships in reconstructing historical trajectories of institutional change. Although archaeologists have made full use of a range of metrics that describe the structural variation of social networks, formal approaches to analyzing the covariance of networks, and the institutions that structured networks in the past, remain undertheorized. In most cases, descriptive metrics are compared between networks built from different datasets or networks separated in time. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) correlations to compare matrices of archaeological data, I draw on a ceramic dataset of approximately 350,000 sherds from the Southern Appalachian region to investigate how decisions related to manufacture choice and to stylistic design covaried with one another between roughly AD 800 and 1650. I explore how material attributes may or may not vary independently of one another and what that means for our analyses of the institutions they reflect. The results contribute to broader comparative analyses of institutional change and perennial discussions of social evolution.

社会、政治和经济制度在空间和时间上以不同的方式相互作用。社会网络分析（SNA）提供了一套分析工具和概念框架，可以在重建制度变迁的历史轨迹时对互动、隶属关系和关系进行正式比较。尽管考古学家充分利用了一系列描述社交网络结构变化的指标，但分析网络协方差的正式方法以及过去构建网络的机构仍然缺乏理论依据。在大多数情况下，描述性指标是在不同数据集构建的网络或时间上分离的网络之间进行比较的。我使用二次分配程序 (QAP) 相关性来比较考古数据矩阵，利用来自南阿巴拉契亚地区的约 350,000 个陶片数据集来研究大约公元 800 年期间与制造选择和风格设计相关的决策如何相互协变和1650。我探讨了物质属性如何可能或不可能相互独立地变化，以及这对于我们对它们所反映的制度的分析意味着什么。研究结果有助于对制度变迁进行更广泛的比较分析和对社会进化的长期讨论。