First NeRoNE meeting held at Voss, Sep. 25th-27th 2013

Last week saw the first research meeting of the NeRoNE project at Voss near Bergen. 12 scholars from 10 universities came together in order to discuss how we can approach the ancient world in general and the Roman Near East in particular in terms of networks. The speakers came from different traditions and disciplines, but all based their discussions on empirical case-studies. This proved to be a constructive way to foster discussion on how different approaches can highlight different aspects of network interaction. Below I summarize the proceedings. Please mind that this is my interpretation of the papers delivered, and that the authors might not agree with it.

As host, I started myself, introducing the NeRoNE project, and outlining how I believe that the methodological and theoretical frameworks from Social Network Analysis and New Institutional economics can be combined in order to help us map, explain and maybe even to some extent measure the importance of everyday interaction in the Roman Near East and other traditional societies.

Terje Stordalen, University of Oslo, followed up with a paper on Mapping potential ancient Near Eastern associations with Latour and Bourdieu. Terje’s presentation used the example of mass-produced Roman period clay figurines from Egypt, in order to show how networks are continuously reproduced by often unintended and unconscious practice. Imperial networks, for instance, might be said to be reproduced by the usage of roads, currency etc., without actors being consciously aware of this, but we also find example of anti-imperial practices, revealing alternative networks.  

Next up was Tom Brughmans, Southampton University, with a paper called From network pattern to network process: exploring tableware distribution networks in the Roman East, 150BC-200AD. Tom, who is a part of the Connected Past group, and at the forefront of archaeological network science, followed the process from data via theory and methodology to results and interpretation. To me, this highlighted the point that theory is there mainly because it can help you with your material and your research questions, but that it is also necessary to be explicit on your use of theory, because there are always theoretical assumptions underlying your work.

Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Phillips University Marburg, gave a talk on Regional mobility and private good exchange - an interpretative attempt within the framework of agency theory. Kerstin’s talk gave a wonderful insight into everyday life in Roman Period Egypt, showing how ties of trust can be established between people with different kinds of relationship and thus contributing towards our understanding of how the ties connecting different parts of a network are constituted.

Michał Gawlikowski, recently retired from Warsaw University after more than four decades of research on the Roman Near East in general and the city of Palmyra in particular, then gave a talk on The Syrian Connection. Palmyra as the hub of the Syrian Foreign Trade. Here he argued that Palmyra was not only a node in a transit trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, but primarily served demand for Eastern textiles and spices in the regional market. For me this came as a useful reminder that the Near East was not only a contact zone between east and west, but can also be seen as a system in itself, perhaps approachable as a small world, following the lead of Irad Malkins recent book on archaic period Greek networks in the Mediterranean.

The next speaker was Ted Kaizer from Durham University. His paper was about Lucian on the temple at Heliopolis. Ted showed how Lucian’s The Syrian Goddess, gives a narrative map of the Near East, where Roman Imperial presence is downplayed, while indigenous and local traditions are emphasised. Arguably, this is an example of the anti-imperial or at the very least non-imperial practices that Terje’s talk had mentioned, showing how underneath the superstructure of Roman rule, alternative networks continued to exist and reproduce.

Oystein LaBianca from Andrews University continued along the same line with Jordan in Global History: The View from Tall Hisban and the Madaba Plains, Jordan. Four decades of archaeology at the site of Hisban have revealed how changing imperial networks have formed life, subsistence and material culture at a site in present day-Jordan. Oystein’s talk called attention to how imperial “Great traditions” and local “Little traditions” meet, co-exist and interact.

Miko Flohr, Leiden University, gave a paper on Networks of the East in the Roman West. Miko discussed evidence of the presence of individuals and groups originating in the Near East from Delos, Puteoli and Rome, warning that it is not always possible to conclude on the existence of networks in general from the presence of individuals and on trading networks from the presence of groups of expatriates.

Leonardo Gregoratti, Durham University, followed up on this with Palmyra and Emesa or "Palmyre sans Emese", showing how contact between places should not be taken as evidence of interdependence, and how trajectories of imperial rule and long distance commerce not always follow the same patterns as those of everyday connectivity.

Michael Sommer, Oldenburg University, returned attention to Social Network Analysis with a paper on Networking the frontier. Roman soldiers and veterans in the Near East. Here he argued that Roman army veterans settling in border areas after service formed a dense local elite network that was closely affiliated with imperial culture, but also connected to local society. Michael’s paper, to me, was a good example of how it is possible to study the relation between networks on different levels.

In her paper The Palmyrene presence in Egypt, Katia Schörle, University of Oxford addressed the presence of people from Palmyra, Syria in Egypt. Generally viewed as a product of the situation on the border between the Roman and Sasanian empires and of Palmyrene territorial expansion into Egypt in the third quarter of the third century, Katia made a strong case for vertical as well as horizontal integration of Palmyrene commercial activities being factors behind Palmyrene activities in Egypt and the Red Sea.

The last paper was by Håkon Steinar Fiane Teigen, who will shortly join the NeRoNE project with his PhD project. A web of missionaries. Dynamics of religious networks in the Middle East in Late Antiquity. Håkon’s project uses the case of Manichaean communities in the Near East in general and in Egypt in particular to investigate the role of religious networks in Late Antiquity. The project clearly has potential for understanding the role of minority groups and for addressing the relationship between local, regional and empire-level networks.  I’ll ask Håkon to write a blog entry about his project as soon as he joins us in Bergen, which I hope will be soon.

To my delight, although not surprise, presentations with quite different points of departure came together very nicely. Just for the fun of it, I've made these two visualizations of their relationship based on the content keywords of network analysis, cohesion, trade, mobility, ideology, tradition, regionality and imperialism. The first is represented as a two-mode network, the second as a one-mode network.

Guest lecture: Miklos Sarkozy – Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy in Sasanian Imperial Ideology

Ideology can also be approached from a network perspective. Rulers of the past carefully constructed legitimacy by linking up to existing ideological currents. This is the topic when Dr. Miklos Sarkozy visits the research group Ancient history, culture and religion and the NeRoNE project, in order to give a talk on 'Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy in Sasanian Imperial Ideology: Achaemenid, Avestan, Parthian, Antique and Judeo-Christian elements of the Sasanian Legitimacy '. Dr. Sarkozy is Associate Professor at Karoli Gaspar University of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and currently a research fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. He has published widely on Iranian history and philology, and is also contributor to the Encylopedia Iranica.


Venue: Seminarrom 1, Øysteinsgate 3.
Time: Tuesday Sep 17, 2013: 14.15-16.00

Blog: archaeological networks

Check out colleague Tom Brughmans' blog on archaeological networks. Tom is PhD-candidate at Southampton University, and has over the last years established himself as a profiled advocate of network approaches to archaeology. Among other things he is part of the team behind the Connected Past conference in Southampton last year, which was a great inspiration for my own project. His blog is a great place for news on publications, projects and conferences as well as reflections on networks in archaeology.

Networks in history and archaeology, some early reflections

Just back from the 33rd Sunbelt conference on Social Network Analysis, and after hosting a stimulating guest lecture by Giovanni Ruffini from Fairfield University last week, I've had the pleasure of watching a number of accomplished social scientists, archaeologists and historians applying formal network approaches to their material. This gives rise to some observations and some thoughts on what Social Network Analysis (SNA) can, could and maybe should contribute towards the study of the ancient world.

This year's Sunbelt conference gathered 690 speakers from all over the world, almost all of them engaging with contemporary material, but there were also one panel dealing with archaeological networks and three addressing historical networks. Most researchers working with SNA gather their data from questionnaires, allowing them to ask their informers whatever they'd like to know, such as, if working with a group of students, "who do you turn to for advice?", "who are you spending time with outside class?", "name up to three persons in the group with whom you do not get along" and so on. This data can then not only be conceptualized and visualized as a network, but also be subjected to quantitative analysis. This of course is a major difference from working with historical or archaeological material, where the nature and availability of data severely restricts what questions can be asked. Historical material can often tell that people moved, or that they were in contact, but sources revealing attitudes or feelings will almost invariably be too anecdotal to useful for statistical purposes. Archaeology has to rely on objects as a proxy in order to understand understand social interaction. This can be done, but it goes without saying that it is challenging.

What then, do researchers working with past societies apply SNA for? There are at least three main approaches with varying degree of methodological stringency. Stringency in lack of a better word, as I think they all have their merits.

One school of research has used Social Network Analysis primarily as a framework for understanding and visualizing interaction in history. This is the approach of Irad Malkin's, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Greeks Overseas (Oxford University Press 2011), where he addresses the formative stages of Greek society and culture in the Mediterranean from a network perspective, offering, in my view, an interpretative framework far superior to earlier competing diffusionist and minimalist, but invariably Aegean-centric narratives of early Greek history. My own first journal-published foray into network studies, which will be come out in November, is inspired by this approach, and addresses the social cohesion of early Indian Ocean networks. I'll put it online in due time. An objection to studies such as these, of course, is that they use the concepts and terminology of SNA, without actually carrying out the analysis. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is different from from the quantitative analysis that the concepts and terminology were developed for.

Scholars engaging with archaeological networks have perhaps even fewer options as to what questions their material can answer than historians. The movement of objects surely indicate contacts, but of what kind, by which roads and which carriers? Are distribution patterns suitable proxies for social networks? It is hard to see how purely archaeological network studies can get beyond the analysis of potential networks, but this in itself can be a great contribution in settings of incomplete or fragmentary data. Also, unlike historians, archaeologist dealing with the ancient world often have large amounts of data available, facilitating the kind of statistical analyses that make SNA a powerful tool in the hands of social scientists. The Sunbelt panel on archeological networks, organized by the people behind the new Nexus 1492-project, addressed issues such as these, focussing on how network theory can be adapted so serve the needs of archaeology, and proved a very stimulating methodological lesson. In the NeRoNE project I hope that archaeological approaches can help map potential religious networks by proxies such as the distribution of temples, churches, synagogues and votive inscriptions.

Closest to mainstream SNA is perhaps the approach advanced by Ruffini in his 2008-monograph Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt (Cambridge University Press), and by most of the contributors to the historical panels at the Sunbelt conference. These scholars use documentary evidence, attesting that people were actually interacting, whether in juridical or commercial transactions, or through ties of marriage, kinship, friendship and so on. This combines the advantage of testability with potential for mapping and visualizing interaction, but requires a suitable and sufficiently large set of data. The problem of course, which is also relevant to a number of studies of contemporary social networks, is that many such studies reveal little about the nature and depth of the relationships mapped. This could in some cases be addressed through qualitative analyses of parts of the material, but these in turn, face problems of representativity. These are possibilities and challenges I hope to take on in the NeRoNE project in studies of networks of power.

Ending this post on an optimistic note, as I really do think that SNA has a lot to contribute to the study of the ancient world, I'd like to mention John F. Padgett's keynote address to the Sunbelt conference, which was on Networks and History. Padgett is Professor of Political Science at Chicago University and is among the senior figures of SNA. Among other fields, he has published on economics, organization theory, law and probability theory, but primarily on history, and employing historical source material from renaissance Florence. In his plenary lecture in Hamburg, he made two important points: Everything is networks, because all change involves interaction and everything is history, because current networks are results of past processes.

Guest lecture: Giovanni Ruffini – Social Networks in the Ancient World

Photo: Cambridge University Press

Giovanni Ruffini visits the research group Ancient history, culture and religion and the NeRoNE project in order to give a talk on 'Social Networks in the Ancient World'. Ruffini is Associate Professor of classical studies at Fairfield University, Connecticut, USA. His 2008 monograph Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt was the first full scale study applying Social Network Analysis on the ancient world. In addition to revisiting his study of Byzantine Egypt in light of later work, Ruffini will also discuss the advantages and limitations of applying network perspectives to ancient history.


Venue: Seminarrom 1, Øysteinsgate 3.
Time: Tuesday May 21, 2013: 14.15-16.00

SAMKUL – Cultural conditions underlying social change

The NeRoNE-project is funded under the Research Council of Norway's SAMKUL-programme (2011-2020), which supports projects from the social sciences and humanities investigating the cultural conditions underlying social change. 15 projects were funded in the first call. Links to their web-pages can be found here.

Textiles and networks

Just back from Marburg in Germany, where I attended a great conference on Textile Trade and Distribution in Antiquity. The organizers from the Seminar für Alte Geschichte at Phillips Universität Marburg had gathered around 30 scholars from archaeology, history, philology, conservation and natural sciences with a common interest in textiles.

Textiles are historically important for several reasons. They represent a basic human need, but are also powerful markers of status and wealth. With light weight and high value, textiles were among the goods traded over long distances in the ancient world, despite high taxes and transport costs. When studying how textiles moved and changed hands, we tend to emphasize trade, but textiles were subject to processes such as gift-exchange, tribute, taxation and plunder, thus being important objects of redistributions. In that respect they are also very relevant to the networks studied in the NeRoNE project.

The organizers promise to publish the proceedings of the conference promptly. Meanwhile, a thorough summary by Teresa Traupe and Louisa Thomas can be viewed here.