Meanwhile in Bergen...

It's been too long since I updated this blog, which does not, however, mean that we have been idle. Here is a brief report on some of the things that has happened since May and that will take place over the next few months.

In late May I went to Singapore where I organised a panel at the Asian Association of World Historians  together with Japanese colleagues Masaki Mukai, Hisatsugu Kusabu, and Yasuhiru Yokkaichi. The session was called Pax Romana and Pax Mongolica: New Approaches to the Anatomy of Pre‐modern Martitime Networks (session 4.3 in the program) and proceedings will eventually be published in the open access Asian Review of World Histories, pending peer review. The conference gave the opportunity to indulge in one of my other academic interests, namely world/global history, which interestingly looks different from an Asian perspective despite the disciplines aim to transcend old, Eurocentric paradigms of history. For my interest in networks a splendid session was World Maps as Knowledge Aggregators: from Renaissance Italy Fra Mauro to Web Search Engines (session 5.5. in the program) where the panelists discussed renaissance texts and maps as early examples of hypertext, and how modern software can be used to mine them for information.

Summer started with the Sunbelt Conference om Social Network Analysis in Brighton, where I presented on the social networks of so-called client rulers in the Roman Near East (an updated and hopefully improved version of the study I've written about here. This year there was one archaeological session and several on historical networks. Interest in historical and archaeological networks is certainly up only in the two brief years since I attended the Hamburg conference, and the Sunbelt is becoming a great place for thinking about and discussing methodology with people working with other periods and empircal settings, and for engaging with the social sciences in general, a useful exercice for scholars working with distant periods.

Next stop was in Konstanz, where Tom Brughmans had invited me to visit the Network Science group of professor Ulrik Brandes and to give a lecture on a network analysis of ancient Indian Ocean trade based on the Greek merchant handbook known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. In addition to the opportunity to have a critical and constructive discussion of some of my case studies with a group of experts on network analysis and graph visualisation I was introduced to the Visone graph visualisation software, which contains a lot of nice features for historical network analyses, such as animations of time sequences, which will come in very handy for the above study of ruler networks that I need to write out for publication soon.

One of the reasons that this blog has been silent over the summer is that the terrible events in Palmyra, Syria has taken time, attention and energy. I had the privilege of visiting Palmyra every year from 2004-2010, and did my postdoc on a project called Palmyrena: City, Hinterland and Caravan Trade between Orient and Occident (2009-2013). Suddenly and tragically expertise on the Roman Near East became much more relevant than I would ever have wanted it to be, and some of my time and much of my attention over the last months have been directed at trying to get information on what has been going on, and telling anyone who cares to listen what Palmyra is and why Palmyra is important. Some of this can be found under media on the publications and talks page or on my Norwegian language blog. On a more positive note the events of Palmyra prompted me to return to my half-finished book manuscript on the trade of the city. It is now finished and submitted. Depending on publisher and peer reviews I hope soon to be able to reveal how social networks is the key to understanding the rise and fall of the remarkable city in the Syrian Desert.

Håkon has also been busy, presenting his work on the Manichaean community in third century Kellis, Egypt at the Historical Network Research Conference in Lisbon this September. He has some really exciting networks of the economic and religious interaction of this religious minority group, which I hope he'll blog about himself.

Lots of nice things are planned for the next months. I'll be giving two talks on Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade at two different conferences, one on trade in minerals, the other on textiles. In both cases network analysis provides opportunities for integrating archaeological and historical data, and arguably gives a better understanding of the interactive and mutual activity of trade than traditional approaches. In November Professor Nicholas Purcell (Oxford) will visit our research group Ancient History, Culture and Religion. Purcell's work with Peregrine Horden on The Corrupting Sea has been instrumental in the surge of interest in network studies within classical and medieval studies, and I'm looking forward to hear hvis view on where the study of connectivity stands now. There's going to be a NeRoNE project conference in December. I'll post details on that when the abstracts are all in, and last but not least Birgit van der Lans, Groeningen, will come to Bergen for her postdoc on a Niels Stensen Fellowship. Birgit works on Jews and Christian in the Roman Empire, partly from a social network perspective. She will join our research group and also be associated with the NeRoNE project.


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The western networks of Palmyra

Two weeks ago, I went to Copenhagen in order to attend the conference Palmyra and the Mediterranean that concluded the Palmyra Portrait Project. The Palmyra Portrait team, headed by Rubina Raja (Aarhus) and Andreas Kropp (Nottingham) have over the last years tracked down, measured, photographed and described more than 2000 of the Palmyrene portrait busts, that once sealed graves in the funerary towers, house-tombs and underground hypogea in the Syrian desert city. Their database will hopefully go online later this year. The database is, however, only part of their work. They are also editing the excavation diaries and notebooks of Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt, one of the most important excavators of Palmyra, they are launching a new book series on Palmyra, and they have organized a series of workshops and conferences.

My own interest in Palmyra stems from my postdoctoral work on the trade of the city, but Palmyra was also of course an important city in the wider context of the Roman Near East, and it is well suited to network studies for reasons of its epigraphic record of some 3000 inscriptions in Aramaic, Greek, and (a few in) Latin. At this conference I was invited to give a talk on the western networks of Palmyra, and below is a brief summary of the approach I took in that paper. What I wanted to demonstrate was how thinking in terms of networks can help explain the rather spectacular career and success of Palmyra, that emerged from obscure origins in the first centuries BCE to compete for leadership of the Roman Empire in the third quarter of the third century. Pending peer-review the paper will eventually appear in a conference volume in the book series launched by the Palmyra Portrait Project and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Palmyra is generally studied for its connections to the east or its situation on the eastern edge of the Roman world, alternatively for its distinctiveness, as something between east and west or something of its own. While I think these perspectives remain valuable and valid, I still appreciate the challenge to think about Palmyra in a Mediterranean context.

Sociologist Michael Mann, in his monumental Sources of Social Power (1986-2012), argues that power relations take the form of social networks.  He identifies four sources of social power: Ideology, Economy, Military and Politics. Networks of course describe connections between people. It is quite possible to study power in the forms of institutions, as traditional social science does, but this misses the aspect that power is always exercised in relation to someone. Arguably Mann’s IEMP model provides a potent framework for understanding Palmyras remarkable trajectory of power, and by not treating power as a zero-sum game, it is also good at catching the dynamics between the multiplicity of tribes, city-states, principalities and empires with a stake in what was going on in the Near East in the Roman period.

Starting with politics, the most constant relation of Palmyra, spanning from some of the earliest inscriptions in the Temple of Bel to the coins of Zenobia and Vaballthus during the rebellion in 270-273, is that with Rome. The Palmyrenes dedicated monuments to the Roman emperors, honour individual Romans as well as Palmyrenes who have been generous on behalf of the city occasion of imperial visits, and of course they employ the Roman name of their city, Hadriana. This is a typical mode of attention seeking for local communities in the Roman World. The remarkable thing with Palmyra is of course that she goes from saying “listen Rome, we are here”, to saying “listen folks, we are Rome”.

Moving on to military power, we have at least 23 inscriptions attesting the presence of Roman officers, soldiers or military units in Palmyra. This of course is what we would expect in a border region like the Syrian Desert, more interesting is the well known fact that we find Palmyrene soldiers in Roman Service attested in several places in Dacia and Numidia, in Egypt, where we have Palmyrene archers at Berenike, and possibly at South Shields in Britain. We also have them at Dura Europos and in a number of other locations on the middle Euphrates. Of course during the third quarter of the third century, we find Palmyrene soldiers just about everywhere from Ctesiphon in the East to Egypt and Anatolia in the west. Through this tradition of Palmyrene military service a strong tradition of Palmyrene integration with the Roman Empire will have evolved, and there is a equal or larger military diaspora in the west, to the much more famous commercial diaspora in the east.

Economically, we get the impression that Palmyra interacts with her surroundingson at least five levels. We have the city itself, then we have the surrounding territory. Third, of course we have the Empire, with its tax and money systems, and movements of resources from the periphery towards the centre, and back towards the frontiers in military expenditure. Fourth, we have Palmyrene commercial activities, attested southwards to the Gulf of Aden, and Eastwards to India, westwards to Egypt, and I think we can assume also to Rome, although we only have indirect evidence in the Palmyrene temple there. Finally, of course, we have the ancient world exchange, spanning from Spanish Silver mines to silk-producing Chinese Mulberry groves, with Palmyra as one of the major gateways integrating the system.

The ideological networks that Palmyra tapped into are perhaps the most difficult to identify. I’ve argued elsewhere that it makes sense to characterise Palmyrene identity at ethnic, in the sense that it was based on perceived common descent, and that the main way of becoming Palmyrene is being born into the group. The Palmyrene community, attested from Mesopotamia and the Gulf of Aden to South Shields, Rome and Numidia shared a feeling of being Palmyrene, that we can trace by proxies such as religion, script, language, sculpture, clothing onomastics, citizenship and so on.

A strong group identity, however, did not prevent Palmyrenes from engaging with other ideological networks, and in my view that is perhaps the main key to understand their success. I have already mentioned how Palmyra competed for privilege and status within the Roman world. The bilingual nature of Palmyra is also interesting in this respect. Many people, and many communities in the Near East will have been bilingual, but the interesting and significant difference with Palmyra is that they make a point of it. They go into the Greek Hellenistic world saying “we are like you”, but at the same time they stand by their Aramaic identity. This will have given them common ground with people in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Near East, and also far further afield in Mesopotamia and further to the East.

Finally, while some aspects of the Palmyrene religious landscape can surely be related to the Syrian identity that we are also looking at through the use of Aramaic language, others seem to have different connotations, like the mounted divinities, often characterized as caravan gods. These seem to relate to the world of nomads, of the steppe, and of aristocratic warrior life. There is also a well-documented Jewish presence in Palmyra, and Palmyrene Jews are attested from a handful of settings outside Palmyra. To use this latter group as an example, people who identified themselves as Palmyrenes and Jews, speaking Greek and Aramaic, being familiar with the ways of the Desert and of the sown, and being able to present themselves as Romans if need be, certainly had a wide register to draw on.

In conclusion, what I think is useful about Mann’s model of Ideological, Economic, Military and Political networks of power with regard to Palmyra is not only that it allows us to show how the city engaged with others in a local, regional and proto-global setting, but it also provides a framework for thinking about how this developed over time. In other words it helps us going from describing the success of Palmyra to also explaining it. This point can also be made for the wider field of network studies, where I think Mann's model is one of the qualitative approaches that has a great potential to explain the patterns revealed by quantitative network analysis.

From Palmyra to the Euphrates: Tracing trade routes as networks

This post summarizes parts of a paper presented at the Connected Past conference in Paris, April 24 this year, and parts of a paper offered together with my colleague Professor Jørgen Christian Meyer at the ARAM conference in Oxford on July 14.

The challenge we’re dealing with is tracing the ancient caravan route from the city of Palmyra to the Euphrates. This part of the Near East is inaccessible to archaeologists, and has been so for a long time. Most existing research dates back to the 1930s, when Antoine Poidebard and Aurel Stein surveyed the route from the air and on the ground, from the Syrian and Iraqi sides of the border respectively.

The network analysis is only part of the wider case study, which besides publsihed archaeological work also considers GIS modelling, satellite images, ethnographic accounts, travel descriptions, and the physical environment of the Syrian Desert. Pending peer review, the study will be published in a forthcoming volume of the journal ARAM.

Step one of the Network Analysis was to locate all known archaeological sites in the relevant part of the Syrian Desert (below). This was done on basis of archaeological reports as well as British, French, German and Soviet Maps of the region, cross-checked with Google Earth, the Corona Atlas of the Middle East and Bing Maps. These were plotted in Google Earth, and then imported into Arcmap. Still, considering the scarcity of past archaeological work, we had no idea whether there were not also other sites out there, that might equally well have been stations on the trade route.

We decided to approach this by looking at hydrology. If you want to move through the Desert with a caravan, you’ll need to know where to find water. Utilizing 1:100 000 maps imported as overlays into Google Earth we plotted all hydrological features in Google Earth. Imported into ArcGis they look like this (below). Altogether there are 244 of them, wells, springs, cisterns. Can we trust that they were the same in antiquity? To a large extent we think we can. The climate has not changed much. Most wells draw on groundwater and are placed at the bottom of wadis, seasonal watercourses that were the same in antiquity as they are today. Finally, our experience from the area North of Palmyra, where we did survey for four years, is that these wells and cisterns are associated with pre-Islamic pottery, and have thus been in continuous use by the nomadic population.

This, however, still did not enable us to trace the route. In order to do that, we turned to network approaches.

First, I added a 20km buffer to all hydrological features (below). 40 km is a long day’s march for people and camels alike, and wherever two circles intersect, you can reasonably walk or ride from one point to another within a day, if you know your way of course. You see here that the region close to Palmyra has a high density of wells. Also, close to the Euphrates, the availability of water is good. Whereas in the middle, you have stretches of up to 100 kilometer without perennial water sources. This is a strong argument that a caravan route needed to be created and maintained, and this was something that the Palmyrenes needed to deal with in their period, regardless of the actual age of the ruins that early explorers in the Syrian Desert visited.

(The map also shows the routes proposed by Poidebard and Stein as well as the theoretical cost path suggested by Arcmap).

I then wanted to turn this into a network. This I did in Arcmap, by automatically creating lines from all hydrological points to all other hydrological points within 40 kilometers. I then exported all points and lines as spreadsheets, keeping information on geographic location intact. These I imported into the Graph software Gephi, using the Geo-layout algorithm plug in developed by Alexis Jacomy. Below you can see what the result looked like.

I did the same with the archaeological sites identified by earlier scholarship. Here, inspired by Cyprian Broodbank and Anna Collar’s use of Proximal Point Analysis, I added the minimum number of edges needed in order to connect nodes to their closest neighbors on all sides. This, I admit, is probably the weakest point of the analysis, as it involved a certain amount of personal judgment.

I then merged my two networks by combining the spreadsheets. This is the result, with nodes sized according to betweenness centrality. We see very clearly how the areas with good access to water, were connected by places where we find archaeological evidence in the nature of defensive structures or inscriptions, and that these nodes act as gateways, that serve to integrate the network.

Calculating shortest paths proved not to be so useful, because there are so many nodes very close to each other and because this treats minor cisterns in the same manner as large fortified stations and major wells, but the measure of betweenness-centrality gives a very good indication that there are some places you simply need to go if you want to have something to drink on your way from Palmyra to Hit. By the way, the shortest path from Palmyra to Hit is 11, coinciding very with recorded travel times of 10 to 14 days. Indicating that the proximal point approach works fairly well.

So, in conclusion. What did we learn from this, and what did Network approaches contribute with?

In terms of the identifying the trade route, it seems safe to say that Poidebard was correct in Syria and Stein was correct in Iraq. What did we contribute with then. Well, while they followed tracks on the ground, there was no guarantee that there were not other tracks around that they never saw. We have made their conclusion testable, by showing that there simply was no other feasible route if you wanted to go the whole way between Palmyra and Hit in the dry season. In that way the question about the date of the ruins in the desert becomes less important, because whether there were fortifications there or not in the Roman period, the network layout shows that the Palmyrenes needed to pass through this places.

Case study: The social networks of client-rulers in the Roman Near East

John the Baptist before Herod Antipas,
Albrecht Dürer 1509. Source: Wikipedia

This week I went to the annual meeting of the UK Classical Association, which was hosted by the University of Nottingham this year. Colleagues Leonardo Gregoratti (Durham) and Eran Almagor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) organized a session on "the Eastern Client States", where I took part. Client states in this context refer to polities in the Near East, that held a large degree of autonomy and were rued by local princes, but which were part of the Roman Empire or the Parthian Empire. Herod the Great, king of Judea 37-4 BCE and universally infamous due to the infanticide ascribed to him in the Gospel of Matthew, is perhaps the most famous of these rulers. In fact there were many of them, and even if there is a clear tendency towards direct and centralized rule over time, the Roman Empire always remained a patchwork of cities, tribes, and principalities with varying degree of autonomy, although there was never any doubt that the real power was in Rome and later in Constantinople.

The client rulers are one of the cases I am studying, with the aim of better understanding the fabric of Near Eastern society in the Roman period. In time I plan to make a study of them for the whole period of Roman rule in the Near East, but for the presentation in Nottingham I started in an end, and attempted a network analysis of the system in the first century BCE and the first century CE. Below is a short summary of my preliminary ideas and finds. Comments and advice on how I could develop this are greatly appreciated.

I started by plotting 163 members of ruling dynasties in the Near East from 63 BCE (the start of Roman Rule) until 125 CE and the 369 ties of full siblinghood, marriage and descent between them in Excel. The entries were based on Richard Sullivan's invaluable prosopographical articles for the Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, bolstered with information from classical encyclopedias. The resulting spreadsheet was saved in csv-format and easily imported into the open-source graph visualization software Gephi using this great tutorial from University of Wisconsin Green Bay Digital Humanities blog. After some time spent identifying and correcting errors in my database that became evident during the import-process, i got this unprocessed graph (below). It does not immediately make much sense. The thick lines represent connections between individuals sharing more than one tie, in effect people marrying their siblings, an unusual, but not unheard-of practice among royals at the time.

The next step was to find a good way of visualizing the whole network. I used the force atlas 2 algorithm in order to arrange nodes and edges in a pattern where they did not overlap. Then I assigned the different dynasties different colors, based on the dynasties people were borne into (as opposed to those they married into. This I did by assigning different series of node id's to different dynasties in my spreadsheet, for instance all individuals belonging to the Herodian dynasty got an id-numer starting with 3. In this way I was able to easily filter out all members of this dynasty in Gephi. Now the network looked like this:

Here, the network is organized according to dynasty, showing the different connections of marriage, descent and siblinghood for the period from 75 BCE until 150 AD and colored after which dynasty people were born into. On one hand of course this is problematic, because dead and living people are included in the same network, on the other hand it is useful, as dynastic connections were used for claims to legitimacy as well as territory and position, and it helps us see which families were important local players and who were more marginal. In that sense it gives us a more comprehensive picture than the stemma we usually look at when we study dynastic networks.

Then I wanted to see how the network changed over time. The problem with this is that we don't have secure information about when all the people in question actually lived. I've tried to overcome this by assigning them quarter centuries when they were politically active, either as rulers or simply as marriage partners and parents. Some were active in dynastic politics for almost 75 years, others only briefly. By assigning each period a unique value in Gephi and using the software's partition feature I was able to create time-series of the network. I've made a short movie of these (below).

Here individuals have been sorted into overlapping 25-years intervals, according to the periods in which they were active. Some of them were political figures for three quarters of a century, others only briefly The slides show how the different dynasties engaged with each other over time, making it possible to discuss questions of integration, fragmentation and marginalisation. It shows very well, for instance how the Herodian dynasty of Judea emerges as the regional power-broker in the late first century BC, and how Armenia is constant arena of dynastic competition, where different dynasties vie for influence. Dynasties such as Emesa never really becom important, while Commagene and Cappadocia remained in the game, but were marginalized over time.

Next, I used the really useful Geo Layout algorithm developed by Alexis Jacomy in order to arrange my nodes according to geographical position (which I had included in my spreadsheet). Now all nodes belonging to the same dynasty were gathered in one point, and thus indiscernible, but instead the geographical development of the network over time became visible:

In this example we no longer see the individuals, but ties between the different dynastic centres instead. They move slightly because the scale of the network varies over time. In terms of geography, we have three main clusters, centered on Anatolia, Northern Mesopotamia and Judea, with Armenia and Commagene as not only the geographical, but also the main dynastical links between them. Also this allows us to look at interaction across the so-called border between the Parthian and Roman worlds or spheres of influence. Doing this, we see that these networks are geographically very expansive, spanning from Mauretania and Rome in the West, to Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia in the east at their greatest. We also see that the great rivals of the Romans, the Arsacid dynasty, by way of Parthia and Media Atropatene, are active participants in the dynastic networks of the Roman Near East, although they seem to become less important over time.

I had great fun while trying to model the client king system, but I also found it scholarly very rewarding. More on this at a later stage, but network perspectives allow us to move the focus from the imperial center to a multiplicity of peripheral points of view. Each of the 163 individuals in the network were at the centre  of their own world, and approaching them as a social network allows us to appreciate this in a different manner. At this stage this is very much work in progress, and I'll continue to develop the technical as well as the scholarly side of this in months to come.

Thanks to the audience and my co-panelists in Nottingham for a good discussion!

Ancient networks and New Institutional Economics

Some weeks ago, I visited Marburg, Germany, to attend a conference on Ancient Economies and Cultural Identities (2000 BC - AD 500). The common interest of the speakers, who included economists and philosophers as well as the usual crew of philologists, archaeologists and historians was that of New Institutional Eonomics as an analytical approach to the study of the ancient economy.

For much of the 20th century, the field of ancient economy was ridden by repeated controversies about the nature of the subject itself. Did the ancient economy work according to the same rules as the modern economy, e.g. with regard to the role of the market as the most important way of distributing wealth – this position was called formalism or modernism, or were economic relations in the ancient world embedded in social and political contexts, such as gift-giving and tribute – the so-called substantivist or primitivist stance?

The third round of this controversy, following Moses Finley's classic The Ancient Economy, (now available in full text online!)  reached its climax by the 1980s By the time I studied ancient history, in the late 1990s, the debate had grown completely stale. The study of the ancient economy had to a large extent been transformed into a discipline of cultural history, and the insistence on the uniqueness, even exoticism of the ancient world, effectively barred economic historians of other periods from taking an interest in antiquity, and students of the ancient economy from making their field relevant and interesting to scholars dealing with other empirical and chronological settings.

Meanwhile, however, the field of economics had moved forward. While specialists of the ancient world were debating whether ancient people acted rationally in economic respects, economists had long started to realize that modern people frequently don’t. Scholars developing the field of New Institutional Economics investigated how institutions shape economic behavior. The market is certainly an important institution in this respect, but there are also many others. Transaction cost theory and the realization that rationality is bounded – restricted and shaped by lack of information, cultural and social constraints etc. also helped explain how different economic mechanisms can come into play at the same time.

Ancient historians may be slow learners, but as many of us have come to realize with regard to the study of the ancient economy over the last few years, the beauty of New Institutional Economics is that it allows us to treat social, political and economic relations within the same analytical framework. Of course it mattered to people in the past whether goods changed hands as a result of market exchange, gift-giving or robbery, but for the historian, it can be useful to treat the three as complementary institutions regulating economic exchange in the ancient world, thus giving us the opportunity to ask, and try to answer, what this reveals about ancient society, thus giving us the opportunity to write what Manning and Morris calls «Social Science History»: Comparative, testable and methodologically explicit.

How does this link up with networks? Well, Douglass C. North, among the leading figures of New Institutional Economics, suggests that the world should be interpreted by means of the analytical terms of «organizations» and «institutions». By organizations, he describes groups of individuals, working towards a mixture of common and individual goals by partially coordinated behavior. In the modern, developed world there are all kinds of organizations, including sports-clubs, universities, private corporations, NGOs, municipalities and governments. In traditional societies, including the ancient world as well as parts of the world today, there were a lot fewer organizations, and most of those that were in existence were of political nature: Tribes, city-states, kingdoms, empires etc. These (with varying success) specialize in generating revenue for their members, and in containing violence inside the group as well as with other groups. Institutions, North says, are «the rules of the game», the formal and informal patterns of interaction between individuals and groups.

My point of departure for the NeRoNE project was that Network Analysis is great for mapping, visualizing and even measuring interaction, but that when we deal with the ancient world, we also need to think carefully about the nature of the ties that constitute our networks. New Institutional Economics is one way of doing that. Networks might be conceptualized as organizations, the ties between the actors as institutions. On one hand this adds a qualitative dimension to network analysis, on the other hand network analysis is a possible strategy for making New Institutional Economics operational on data from the ancient world.

The Marburg conference featured lots of stimulating papers on how institutional approaches can inform the study of economic interaction in the ancient world. I look forward to the proceedings that are promised in due time.

Proto-globalisation in the Indian Ocean World and network approaches

Last weekend I attended the concluding conference of the ERC-funded Sealinks project. The Sealinks group, headed by Nicole Boivin of Oxford University, has investigated the early maritime links that connected societies on the Indian Ocean rim, using primarily evidence produced by archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, genetics and linguistics. Many results have already come out, and these shed light on processes going further back in time and having more profound and lasting impact, than those evident from earlier studies based on artefactual, epigraphic and literary evidence.

The conference gathered researchers working with biological and environmental proxies, along with with traditional archaeologists and the odd historian. Indian Ocean trade and navigation, as well as the  early history of globalisation being among my other research interests, I found the conference immensely informative. It struck me, however, that although almost all presenters used the N-word, there was next to no discussion on what a network is, how past networks can be approached, and what insights this might give. This is not intended as criticism of the work presented, which was generally of very high standard. In fact the observation would be valid for most archaeological conferences I've attended, and I've worked with the Indian Ocean for more than ten years myself before starting consciously to think in terms of networks myself. Indian Ocean connectivity, however, is a subject that would readily lend itself to network approaches, and in this post I'd like to share a few thoughts on how different groups of material might have benefitted from being approached from a network perspective.

Networks of people

My own research on Indian Ocean trade is primarily on merchant networks: how they formed, cohered, operated and interrelated. In my paper in Oxford I argued that merchants from the Syrian city of Palmyra engaged with local and regional social networks of power, ideology/religion and commerce, in the process of expanding their own ethnically based network from the Syrian Desert into Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. Our data on merchant networks are of literary, epigraphic and ceramic nature – the Palmyrene network for instance being attested by circa 50 inscriptions recording the presence or activities of Palmyrene groups and individuals in settings certainly or very likely connected with Indian Ocean trade. Similar data would be possible to utilize for other groups. Ingo Strauch and collaborators for instance recently published more than 200 inscriptions in Arabic, Indic, Ethiopic, Aramaic and Greek script from a sanctuary in the cave of Hoq on the island of Socotra. Many of these should be possible to connect with places of origin, religion, language, and script used, reconstructing the network that intersected at the node of Hoq in a manner that would be possible to approach by the toolbox of Social Network Analysis.

Networks of objects

New inscriptions are occasionally still discovered, but in general, the written evidence relevant to ancient Indian Ocean trade is delimited and finite. The archaeological data available from Indian Ocean settings, however, has exploded over the last two decades, following major excavation projects  and better practices of documenting, identifying and publishing finds. In my opinion, there are cases where distribution patterns are not necessarily well suited for network analyses, as the presence of objects does not always reveal how, when and by which routes and agents they moved from point of origin to find-spot. In the case of the Indian Ocean, however, distribution patterns clearly do have potential for network analyses, as distances, topography and climate led to virtually all communication taking place by sea. Network analysis based on distribution patterns of ceramics, beads and glass – goods that can be traced to place of production on stylistic, chemical and petrographic grounds, could clearly reveal directions, bottlenecks and clustering of trade.

Networks of places

Clearly, the same would be the case with settlements. Attempts at modeling relationships between ports and their hinterlands and between ports, based on size, kinds of imports and exports, period of occupation, distance to other centers, season of navigation etc. might help us think about why some places and some regions were important, while others seem to not to have been taking part in long-distance exchange to the same extent.

Networks of genes

Many of the papers in Oxford were on the movement of crops, animals and people, studied by way of genetic material recovered from archaeological sited. Dispersal of genes was in most cases visualized by phylogenetic trees. This is of course also a network analysis, showing genetic connections between the varieties of crops etc. found in different settings. If sufficient numbers of dated examples exist from a sufficient number of sites, I think these would also be good for showing patterns of prehistoric seafaring.

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.

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.