<p>In Northeast Asia, dolmens cluster along littoral and river-corridor belts from Liaoning across the Yellow Sea rim of Korea to Kyushu. Within this belt, we analyze the Gochang (Asan-myeon) dolmen corpus. A strand of archaeological work—often adopting a top-down perspective on social organization and change—has assessed sociopolitical significance via material and locational indicators (e.g., capstone size), treating monumentality as a proxy for hierarchy, labor mobilization, or ritual symbolism. Complementing this approach, we evaluate the relational significance of dolmens—specifically testing whether large/monumental dolmens occupy structurally central positions within plausible movement networks—using spatial-network centrality with an emphasis on betweenness. Assuming that the construction period of the dolmens—estimated to span from ca. 300 BCE to 1 CE—can be treated as a single temporal unit, we analyzed approximately 196 dolmens distributed in Asan-myeon, Gochang County, Jeollabuk-do. To operationalize this approach, an undirected spatial network was constructed using a 2.5&#xa0;km distance threshold to define connections. Degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality were calculated, followed by statistical analyses including Spearman’s rank correlation, Kruskal–Wallis tests, and Dunn’s post-hoc tests. In addition, path counts were computed to assess how frequently each dolmen appeared along the shortest paths in the network. We complement the network analysis with a minimal terrain-aware visibility check (DEM-based cumulative viewshed and a distance-hub buffer hybrid) and ask whether network-derived hierarchy ranked by betweenness centrality is consistent with visibility/near-proximity coverage of the assemblage. Interestingly, dolmens with high betweenness centrality generally did not overlap with the largest or highest-terrain elevation dolmens. Rather, they frequently appeared as intermediary nodes along movement routes in the spatial network. Notably, the top 10 dolmens with the highest betweenness centrality were traversed in 77.5% and 87.9% of the shortest paths leading to the top 5% largest and highest-terrain elevation dolmens, respectively. These findings suggest that such dolmens may have functioned as “gateway nodes” within prehistoric spatial structures. Under the hybrid Visibility-and-Distance setting, the top-betweenness set covers 136 of 196 dolmens (69.4%), indicating that betweenness-hubs locally encompass a clear majority of the assemblage. Taken together, these results highlight a potential decoupling between symbolic significance (size, terrain elevation) and structural importance (network centrality), a finding further supported by viewshed (visibility) analysis. Accordingly, dolmens may have served not only as political or religious monuments but also as functional nodes within everyday movement networks. This points to the possibility of a multi-layered understanding of spatial hierarchy and functional differentiation in prehistoric dolmen landscapes.</p>