New publication: The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: A network approach

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Roman period guide to trade and navigation in the Indian Ocean. Justly famous for offering a contemporary and descriptive account of early Indian Ocean trade, the work has been subject to and a point of departure for numerous studies. Its extensive influence on scholarship is, however, also problematic, as it reflects the limited information and cultural and personal bias of its unknown author. Network analysis allows us to map, visualize and measure interconnectedness in this text. Many of these connections are not explicitly mentioned in the text, but by connecting not only places with places, but also products with places that export and import them, we get a partly different impression of Indian Ocean trade from that conventionally gathered from the Periplus. It allows us to ask questions about the relationship between coastal cabotage and transoceanic shipping, to identify regional trading circuits, and unexpected centres of long-distance exchange.

Asian Review of World Histories // Volume 4, Issue 2/JULY 2016, pp. 191-205

Zoomable figures and dataset are available from Bergen Open Research Archive

New publication: Writ in water, lines in sand

I've got a new article out. It is called "Writ in water, lines in sand: Ancient trade routes, models and comparative evidence" and deals with the problems of tracing connectivity in the distant past. It started as a paper at  the workshop A Thousand Worlds: Network Models in Archaeology, Durham October 2013. Thanks to Rune Rattenborg for inviting me to the workshop and to Kristoffer Damgaard for his extensive comments to the manuscript.

The article is published in Cogent Arts & Humanities, a new Open Access mega-journal for the humanities, and can be dowloaded for free from their website. They demand a public interest statement for each article, explaining why it is interesting and important. I've pasted mine with the abstract below:

Abstract

Historians and archaeologists often take connectivity for granted, and fail to address the problems of documenting patterns of movement. This article highlights the methodological challenges of reconstructing trade routes in prehistory and early history. The argument is made that these challenges are best met through the application of modern models of connectivity, in combination with the conscious use of comparative approaches.


Public Interest Statement

Trade is a driving force in the global economy, and among the prime agents of wealth distribution as well as cultural and political change. Historical and archaeological research has demonstrated that this is no recent phenomena, but that forerunners of the processes today labelled as globalization have been at work within all spheres of society throughout human history. While acknowledging the central role played by long-distance trade in the past, I argue in this article that scholars often take connectivity for granted, overlooking the major physical and institutional obstacles to travel in the premodern period, as well as the problems inherent to reconstructing the dynamic process of trade from the static evidence of texts and archaeological data. By insisting that scholars should not limit themselves to observing that objects moved and changed hand, but also ask how, we may not only increase our understanding of premodern economies, but also be in a position to better appreciate the nature of contemporary exchange.