Network theories and methodologies have emerged as key tools in elucidating the mechanisms of ancient interconnectivity in the past two decades. Network-based approaches, which focus on elaborating relationships between entities and their associated structures and patterns, materialised in the social sciences in the 1930s. Social Network Analysis (SNA) saw an uptick in development over the 1970s and first infiltrated archaeological research at this time (T. Brughmans, ‘Thinking Through Networks’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [2013]). The surge of network models and theories in archaeological research, however, occurred in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. New paradigms that stressed the interconnectivity of microregions were already reformulating the trajectories of ancient Mediterranean societies back in the 1990s and 2000s, but some early approaches were criticised for being overly static and timeless. The work of many ‘second wave’ studies of Mediterranean interconnectivity fruitfully employed networks – from formal network analyses to more generalised ‘network thinking’ – to uncover the deeper mechanisms that configure human and object relationships, bridging micro- and macro-scales.
These new approaches are not without drawbacks, and the volume under review brings a critical lens to the utility of network approaches in the study of Mediterranean and European prehistory. It is the result of an interdisciplinary research programme, ‘Tracing Networks: craft traditions in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and a conference funded by the British Academy. The papers focus on the interpretative and explanatory potential of network thinking across a range of case studies. They demonstrate the potential of networks to provide a truer picture of the socio-economic trajectories of ancient societies, yet also offer considerations on how we might alter assumptions built into network thinking so that our models better reflect reality.
Following an introduction, the volume is divided into seven chapters and an index. The first two chapters bring theoretical and methodological considerations to networks and their material traces. Foxhall (Chapter 1) interrogates assumptions built into formal and conceptual network models, problematising in particular the tendency to ‘overstate the roles and agency of material things in human social relationships and societies’ (p. 3). This tendency extends to the use of material remains as proxy data for reconstructing human–human (and human–thing) relationships (p. 11). Foxhall advocates clarifying uncertainties and assumptions about what material proxy data represents when modelling ancient socio-economic networks, alongside being willing to test devised models against alternative ones (p. 14). In Chapter 2 S. Hakenbeck, K. Rebay-Salisbury and R.B. Salisbury introduce the concept of Zeitgeist to capture large-scale worldviews that cut across cultural and regional boundaries, which are expressed materially. This conceptual framework captures shared material culture across long distances without privileging any point of origin and connects large-scale patterns with personal and lived experiences. Their case studies include the ditch enclosures of fifth-millennium central Europe, the return of human imagery in art from Iron Age Europe and the Mediterranean, and the funerary practices of early medieval Europe, all of which suggest that ‘the identity-generating aspect of Zeitgeist was (and perhaps still is) of particular importance during times of great change and social fragmentation’ (p. 40).
The following five chapters further explore the application of network thinking to antiquity using archaeological data. These studies include B. Legarra Herrero's investigation of social and economic relationships between various polities of the Argaric region in south-eastern Spain in the Bronze Age (Chapter 3). Through an examination of the procurement of local and long-distance resources alongside burial customs across different settlements, Herrero highlights the ‘seemingly contradictory set of homogeneous traits and heterogeneous behaviours’ (p. 58) wrought by various interaction processes between settlements, and advocates moving beyond the tendency to focus on internal political organisation as the sole generator of the cultural and urban formations of this period. In the following chapter J. Sofaer scrutinises shifting production methods of vessel types from the tell site of Százhalombatta-Földvár over the Bronze Age. Through a combination of ethnographic examples and close analysis of pottery assemblages from several periods, Sofaer interprets the decline in techniques as a breakdown of embodied (and transmitted) knowledge representative of deeper societal disintegration that included the collapse of a robust hierarchical craft production network. In Chapter 5 A. Harding explores methods for encapsulating the well-trodden topic of Late Bronze Age interconnections across the Mediterranean and continental Europe as expressed through material traces, including raw materials such as amber and tin and finished products such as beads and weaponry. Harding stresses network approaches as better suited to micro-level analyses than older World Systems/Core-Periphery approaches, which tended to impose top-down models that overshadowed human agency, particularly at the so-called peripheries.
In Chapter 6 J. Hruby challenges modern assumptions about the value of network integration, finding a voice for processes of localisation, resistance and nostalgia in the otherwise frenzied scholarly push to uncover webs of relationships. Hruby identifies characteristics to look for when identifying processes of recoil from networks, for instance pre-existing local traditions that are materially distinguishable, which intensify over time amidst integration into wider networks. This chapter concludes with a case study presenting statistical analyses of miniature vessels employed at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, whose use and production intensified around the period of the palace's destruction c. 1180 bce. The final chapter, by C.M. Antonaccio, explores shifting networks of identities at Morgantina on Sicily before and during the period of Greek occupation. While the postcolonial concept of hybridity is often applied to these migratory scenarios to capture the complexity of identities, Antonaccio argues that Assemblage Theory is more apt to encapsulate the human, material and environmental elements that came together, recombined and came apart at Morgantina. Assemblage Theory shares advantages with network thinking, including recognising the inter-operation of many actors and experiences to produce categories that we infer from the archaeological record, such as social identity (p. 122).
The strengths of this volume stem from the fruitful questioning of assumptions built into network models. Foxhall's correctives offered for more extreme theories of material agency have been stressed in other recent publications that have critiqued object agency as fetishism, a misattribution of power to non-living entities that obscures the real (human) social relationships and processes at play (K. Kristiansen, Homo Migrans [2022], p. 33; A. Hornborg, Global Magic [2016], p. 109). Further chapters expound upon the added weight a fragmented archaeological record brings to these misattributions: in discussing the potentials of network analyses for long-distance commodities in the Late Bronze Age, Harding tellingly notes, ‘for amber alone, a single distribution map of types would probably tell one what one needed to know’ (p. 93). In other words, without an understanding of both the archaeological contexts and the deeper socio-economic processes that drove the distribution of amber, network analyses risk becoming untested assumptions about social and material relationships animating more basic spatial configurations. This situation is blurred further in Chapter 2 with the concept of Zeitgeist. The authors of Chapter 2 state that ‘The way in which Zeitgeist spreads and is communicated is central to understanding its role in engendering temporal identity’ (p. 38), but once again readers might question where the utility of networks really lies in such scenarios when we often lack clear social contexts for these material expressions found over such wide distances. Yet such questioning is arguably necessary if we are to apply these theories and methodologies responsibly to the societies we study.
The emphasis on the diachronic nature of networks, in chapters by Foxhall, Sofaer, Hruby and Antonaccio, is also noteworthy: the temporal component is an aspect of social networks ‘depressingly little studied’, to quote M. Granovetter (Society and Economy [2017], p. 19). The neglect of historical dynamics, in Granovetter's view, tends to beget functionalist or culture-history explanations, which obscure human agency within amorphous social systems. Several chapters contextualise the persistence of the culture-history paradigm, elaborated in the earlier twentieth century by archaeologists such as V.G. Childe and G. Kossinna, which focused on ‘studying, defining and discerning cultural and ethnic identity through material culture’ (pp. 118–19). Herrero's chapter pushes back on this tendency by demonstrating the non-boundedness of various polities in south-eastern Spain via polythetic cultural practices. Indeed, networks have been put forth as a panacea to this entrenched way of thinking, as has genomic modelling of population movements – although the latter has been shown to be subject to the same dangers of culture-history, mapping static cultural and ethnic identities onto genetic signatures (O. Gokcumen, Homo Migrans [2022]). With all the inferences we build into material remains about past identities, are network models in danger of the same repetition? After all, any model or theory is only as accurate as the assumptions built into it, and the tendency persists to ‘read’ complex identities from fragmentary datasets without full clarification of uncertainties (as Foxhall suggests).
It is worth stating that many of the studies build in inferences that need elaboration. Hruby's analysis of miniaturisation at Pylos certainly shows clear statistical patterns in intensification of miniatures around the date of the palace's destruction, but how strange or ‘local’ were these vessels and the practices associated with them? Hruby mentions miniatures increasing outside Messenia in LHIII as well (pp. 108, 111), and more discussion of these wider contexts is needed to evaluate whether the cases at Pylos are evidence of resistance and localisation. Likewise, the account of circular enclosures as the Zeitgeist of the central European Neolithic rests on the interpretation of their meaning as connected to ‘shared interactions with the soil’ (p. 31), associated with the digging of ditches around these enclosures. Once again, there is little discussion as to why soil became the impetus for these enclosures and not something else – other than that soil was everywhere and was the most common construction material. It is an interesting suggestion no doubt that warrants further elaboration, but in the space allotted it comes across as inferences devised to illustrate (and thus fit) the model of Zeitgeist.
Engagement with more recent network theory would also add to many of these arguments. Foxhall highlights the issue of misrepresenting ‘motivational complexity’ when characterising networks (p. 11). This issue could be further explored through studies of complex contagions by sociologists (e.g. D. Centola, How Behavior Spreads [2018]), which analyse the typical network structures that permit complex behaviours and beliefs to spread and take root. Engagement with these models would be especially fruitful for the chapters that analyse craft production networks, particularly the spread of ‘embodied knowledge’ outlined by Sofaer. Other intersecting models that might bolster these conversations include globalisation theory (mentioned in Hruby's chapter), which attempts to capture contradictory processes such as homogeneity and heterogeneity, deterritorialisation and localisation (T. Hodos, The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age [2020]), all concepts mentioned at various points in the volume.
Overall, this volume is an effective intervention in ongoing scholarly conversations surrounding the utility of network thinking. The shortcomings mentioned above are not unique to these studies. Recognising the tendency to assume more than we can really demonstrate about human behaviours and relationships from the archaeological record is a useful reflection for all researchers applying network models to past societies.
