Tibetan cultures reflect deeply rooted, regional interactions and diverse subsistence practices across varied high-altitude environments of the Tibetan Plateau. Yet, it remains unclear how these cultural relationships and social interactions took shape through time and how they were influenced by ecologically oriented behavioral strategies (e.g. mobility) emerging in prehistory. Recent applications of network analysis provide novel tools to quantitatively measure shared forms of material culture, but there have been fewer attempts to couple social network analysis with fine-grained geospatial modelling of prehistoric human mobility in Tibet. In this study, we developed an integrated high-resolution geospatial model and network analysis that simulates and correlates subsistence-based mobility and ceramic-based cultural material connectivity across the Tibetan Plateau. Our analysis suggests that (1) ecologically driven patterns of subsistence-based mobility correspond geographically with Bronze and Iron Ages settlement patterns across the Tibetan Plateau; (2) diverse material interaction networks among communities within western and central Tibet and trans-Himalayan connectivity across the broader Inner Asian Mountain Corridor can be linked to modeled differences in regional networks of subsistence mobility. This research provides ecological and archaeological insights into how subsistence-oriented mobility and interaction may have shaped documented patterns of social and material connectivity among regional Bronze and Iron Age communities of the Tibetan Plateau, prompting a reconsideration of Tibet's long-term cultural geography.

Figure 3: Simulated “mobility highways” of farmer–herder interactions overlaid with the geolocated archaeological sites dated between ca. 3600 and 2200 BP.
Figure 3: Simulated “mobility highways” of farmer–herder interactions overlaid with the geolocated archaeological sites dated between ca. 3600 and 2200 BP. The red line on the map indicates the pathways of the highest simulated “traffic volume”, The closer a site is to the “mobility highways”, the more efficient the flow of material, commodities, ideas, and information during its period of occupation. This map shows that the “mobility highways” are concentrated in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau.