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

Seminar: Social Networks in Ancient and Medieval History

Social Networks, not swords, civilised
the northern barbarians, or so it appears.
Italian WW1 war-bond poster.
 Photo courtesy of J.C. Meyer.

Last week I was invited  to take part in a small seminar organized by the research group for premodern history, department of archaeology, conservation and history, University of Oslo. The seminar was aimed at students writing their MA-theses within ancient and medieval history, in order to make them think about how different kinds of social network approaches could inform their research. I got to talk about my networks of local rulers in the Roman Near East and of water sources in the Syrian Desert, but more important to me I got to listen to some really great presentations on social networks in early medieval northern Europe.

Pierre Bauduin (Caen) spoke on "Social networks, mediation and competition in the Viking Age: the Frankish example", where he demonstrated how the Frankish elite and their Viking neighbours in present day Denmark cultivated ties by way of hospitality, and exchange of spouses, hostages and foster-children. This facilitated trust between groups who had common interest in peaceful relations, but who shared few institutional ties, notably the Danes were still mostly adherents of the pre-Christian Norse religion, and social networks paved the way for the first Christian missionaries to Scandinavia.

Philadelphia Ricketts (independent scholar) gave a talk on "Snorri Sturluson and his daughters". Snorri (1179-1241) is a famous poet, but was also a powerful chieftain in 13th century Iceland, and a key player in the bloody events leading up to the takeover of the island by the king of Norway in 1262. Philadelphia showed how Snorri, with variable success, married off his daughters as part of his political power games, but also how his daughters were not always willing to or able to play their part. The talk showed how women were instrumental in creating links between otherwise separate social networks in clan-based, pre-state Iceland, and how resourceful individuals were able to utilise this situation to improve their own position.

Richard Gaskins (Brandeis) addressed "Political Development in Early Iceland: Applying Network Theory to the Sagas", where he argued that Icelandic society in the settlement period (870-930) show the characteristics of a "small-world" network, while in the following period of chieftains (930-1080) networks were of the "distributed" kind, giving way to "hub and spoke" networks in the late pre-state period of larger domains (1080-1246). Gaskins use of network models gave very evocative descriptive accounts of the situation in premodern Iceland, and also opened the way for discussing how and why networks changed.

Apart from all papers giving insight into fascinating historical settings and source material, I was intrigued by the explanatory potential of social network approaches to pre-state societies. These were situations where few or no formal political and legal institutions were in existence, and social networks were thus allowed to operate undisturbed so to say. Part of the idea behind the seminar was to get the students interested in network approaches, and I hope we can look forward to some exciting  MA-theses from Oslo in a year or so. Meanwhile I have to admit that I am a tad bit envious on the people researching medieval Iceland for their incredibly rich source material.

The social in the past, some reflexions

I'm just back from a four-day workshop with colleagues at the Centre for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Sciences, where both Håkon and I take part in the project Local Dynamics of Globalisation in the pre-modern Levant, which is housed at the centre for this Academic Year. Our workshop was called The Social in the Past. Things, Networks, and Texts: A Material Approach to the Pre-Modern (description and program). Speakers came from a range of disciplines, including theology, religion, anthropology, archaeology, history, and cultural studies, but the unifying interest was in how we can move from our things and text – the material that we are all interested in and the signs that have come down to us from the past – to understanding the social associations between these things, texts and the people who made and used them. The workshop was way too varied and rich for me to do justice to all of it in a short blog post, nevertheless I'd like to put down a few points that relate to networks, which is of course my main interest in this, that we discussed in the first session, and that I continued to think about during and after the workshop.

Our keynote was Professor Ian Hodder from Stanford University. Hodder spoke about his work at Neolithic Çatalhöyük  in present-day Turkey, one of the earliest (complex?) societies we know of, taking his recent book Entangled as his point of departure. Neolithic people, of course, produced no texts, and we rely solely on things, in a wide sense of the word, when we try to understand their social world. Hodder showed us how things are associated with things and also reveal interaction with people, for instance clay and temper are obtained – balls are formed – balls are fired – then stored – then heated in oven – placed hot in a basket – meat is cooked – broken balls are discarded and so on. Reconstructing relationships of contingence and dependence, leading to reliance and dependency, he drew what he called tanglegrams, showing how things at the site related to each other, and in some cases led to what he characterised as entrapment, resembling the economic term of path-dependence.

Hodder also shared examples of his ongoing cooperation with network analyst and archaeologist Angus Mol (Leiden), using the same dataset of thing-thing relations from Çatalhöyük in a computer based network analysis. Hodder argued that the tanglegram is different from network analyst in the sense that the network consists of dyads, whereas the entanglegram highlights chains.

To me both methods represent ways of approaching networks. I think we need to do both. The tanglegram takes the thing as the point of departure, and tries to see how it associates to other things (or to human agents), following these associations creates entangled chains, that very well demonstrates the complexity that Hodder underlines. Network analysis looks at the whole structure (to the extent that we know it), and let's us ask how the things and the associations between them fit into that structure. It is true that it is an agglomeration of dyads, but series of dyads are also chains (or rather networks), and if we combine the quantitative analysis with a qualitative one, we could trace associations in much the same way. One advantage of network analysis might be that it could enable us to identify which parts of the network offer themselves, and are in need of qualitative analysis.

These points illustrate what we are grappling with. During the workshop we discussed a number of theories, including those of Latour, Bordieu, Foucault, Braudel, Michael Mann, and Robert Redfield, and how they allow us to see the past through different lenses. Although I, as others, have my favourites, they all offer perspectives that allow us to interpret the relationship between things, texts and people. What I often miss are the models that enable us to make our assumptions explicit, and to test them. The tanglegram and network analysis are two examples of how one can develop or borrow models that make sense of some aspects of the data, but inevitably obscure or leave out others.

Is it rewarding for scholars of the ancient world to engage consciously with theory and model building. To me the answer is a clear yes. Our sources don't speak for themselves. Theoretical perspectives allow us to situate our data in a wider context, models allow us to test our assumptions.

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.

Call for papers, session at the 2014 ASOR annual meeting

Together with Dr. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, University of Kassel, we are hosting a session on "Sinews of Empire": Networks in the Near East" at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, which will be held in San Diego, November 19-22.

Here is the abstract for our session:

Sinews of empire: Networks in the Near East

This session addresses the role of networks and social relationships, as facilitators of interaction and integration between imperial, regional and local levels in the history and archeology of the Near East. Contributors are encouraged to situate their papers within theoretical frameworks that facilitate comparison between periods and empirical settings.

From the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the end of the colonial period, the Near East was dominated by a series of large, multiethnic empires, most of them centered outside the region itself. Recent studies have moved emphasis from metropolitan to regional and local points of view, but arguably most have continued to cast representatives of imperial rule as protagonists or antagonists in narratives of domination, resistance, integration and fragmentation. In recent years, a resurgence in interest in network approaches has offered new tools to conceptualize, visualize and arguably even measure interaction in past societies. In this session we aim to utilize network perspectives in an attempt to shift attention to everyday ties of business, religion, power and social interaction. How did networks develop? What where the institutions underpinning interaction and fostering integration? What impact did formal and informal rules have on interaction within these networks? How did networks react to stress on imperial level, such as invasions, economic crisis or civil war? We especially welcome papers situating data within theoretical frameworks such as Network Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Actor Network Theory and Agency Theory, in order to facilitate comparison between groups, over time and between different parts of the Near East.


If you are interested in participating, paper proposals can be submitted via ASOR's online submission system

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.

New Connected Past conference next April

My great colleagues in the Connected Past community is hosting a conference in Paris next April. Their 2012-conference in Southampton was a great success, and this is an event that should not be missed!

Workshop at Durham University: A thousand worlds...

Just back from Durham, UK, where Assyriologist and PhD-candidate in archaeology, Rune Rattenborg, hosted the workshop A Thousand Worlds: Network Models in Archaeology (follow link for program and abstracts). The workshop gathered scholars bringing data such as roads and routes, place-names, settlements, temples, agricultural estates and cuneiform texts into play using a range of different network approaches. I especially appreciated the variety of approaches represented, from Network Science over Social Network Analysis to Actor Network Theory and Michael Mann-style networks of social power. I see these approaches as complementary rather than mutually exclusive, the theories of Latour and Mann being potential tools for the qualitative analysis of the results created by quantitative approaches such as Network Science and SNA. It remains to see, of course, how feasible this is to carry out in practice.

My own paper was about the challenges of tracing dynamic phenomena, such as trade and movement, through static proxies, such as archeological finds, texts and inscriptions. Here I think network analysis has much to offer compared to traditional, descriptive analysis, as it forces us to make the assumptions underlying our conclusions explicit.

Among the highlights in Durham, by the way, was Anna Collar's presentation on religious networks in the Roman Empire. Her book on the topic is coming out on Cambridge University Press in a few weeks. Being interested in religious networks myself I promise to blog about the book once its out.


Update 28.10.13:
Tom Brughmans gives a more comprehensive summary of the workshop at electricarchaeology.ca with a highly readable discussion of some of the main questions we touched on there.

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.

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