Abstracts Workshop 13/14 November
From TracingNetworksWiki
Connected Practices: Rethinking Colonial Networks and Migration in the Ancient Mediterranean
Peter van Dommelen
Archaeologists and historians who seek to examine long-distance and overseas connections in the ancient Mediterranean have long focused their attention on the networks of historically well-attested 'colonies' established across the Mediterranean by Mycenaeans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The evidence for the Classical world is such that there can be no doubt that people moved from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and indeed beyond, into the Black Sea and along the Atlantic shores. The connections forged by these foundations and movements have usually been taken for granted and as self-explanatory, as is shown by habitual references to colonial settlements as nodes in a colonial network and by using colonial connections to explain cultural change. As a consequence of this emphasis on the overall network, little or no attention is usually paid to the people who moved around and both forged and maintained these connections - or not, as may have been the case. As postcolonial approaches to colonial settlements contact situations are calling for more attention to the role played by people of both colonial and indigenous backgrounds in the colonial situations, there is, however, clearly good reason to reconsider how people made contact with each other and, in some cases, stayed in touch. In this paper, I will look into the movements of people themselves and both set out some theoretical considerations and explore their implications for one or two case studies in the western Mediterranean.
Exploring the potential of employing network theory, concepts, and tools, in researching the diffusion and development of ideas and technologies in ancient societies
Steve Conway
Over the last 10-15 years, the network perspective has proved a valuable approach in developing our understanding of the innovation and diffusion processes. Networks can be seen to be a key component in the bringing together of disparate ideas to create novelty; they also provide the structures through which such novelty is diffused. The process of diffusion, however, is rarely one simply of 'transfer and adoption', but more frequently one of 'assimilation and adaptation', thus allowing a place for agency and context to shape ideas as they pass through networks. The diversity of theories and concepts that have emerged within the network literature, offer great potential for the interpretation and re-interpretation of archaeological knowledge concerning the emergence and transfer of ideas and technologies in ancient societies. This paper will explore those which appear to offer most promise. In contemporary organisations and societies, the traces of network are relatively easy to uncover through questionnaires, interviews, documentary evidence, and computer trails. This is clearly not the case in tracing networks within ancient societies. This paper will look at the variety of data required to map networks (e.g. concerning actors, links, and flows), and consider some initial possibilities for their tracing and mapping within such ancient societies.
Extending the “Community of Practice”: Linking individual to tradition through community-based networks
Sheila Kohring
Archaeology is often stuck between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis of relativistic and evolutionary perspectives. This typically manifests as a focus either on the individual and the discrete or that of the “Tradition” and the large scale. The community, however, is an integral pivot point for understanding how individuals act and how this creates regional patterns and material “Traditions”. This paper focuses on the community of practice – the integrated social group enabling meaningful learning – as a fundamental starting point for understanding how individuals connect, learn and make their world material. Building in a network-based approach, I explore how communities of practice interconnect through shared practice and meaning to create and maintain regional consistency that contributes to the establishment of particular material traditions, such as those seen in pottery and forms of human representation.
Networks and core periphery models
Martin Everett
Martin Everett is Professor of Social Network Analysis based in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences. Martin has over 30 years research experience in the field, is a co-author of the software package UCINET and was President of the International Network of Social Network Analysts from 2000 to 2003. Martin has provided consultancy and designed and run short courses on network analysis to a variety of companies and organizations nationally and internationally. These include organisations from both the public sector such as the Home Office, MoD, Dstl, Demos and Defra; and the private sector such as Unilever, Qinitiq, Astaire (Italy), Towers-Perrin (USA). These organizations have been looking at the application of social network analysis in a wide variety of areas for example; criminal networks, radicalisation, viral marketing, team building, re-structuring, movement of livestock and inter-organizational collaborations.
Martin’s main research interests are in the development and applications of methods for analysis; he is particular interested in centrality, positional analysis and core-periphery models but has also worked on 2-mode data, cohesive subgroups and algebraic models.
He is also tasked with developing and co-ordinating social network analysis across all the disciplines in the university with the aim of re-establishing Manchester as one of the leading centres in the world for the subject.
Applying Consumer Theory to the Roman World
Nick Ray
The application of the theoretical construct of ‘consumption’ is a valuable lens through which orientations towards material culture in the ancient world can be examined. This approach enables nuanced interpretation of socio-economic behaviour represented by human agencies, such as identity construction and consumer selection.
The theoretical framework for this study will be introduced, and its application to household artefactual data from Pompeii, Italy, will subsequently be demonstrated. Employing statistical analysis via constructs such as ‘materialism’ and ‘discretionary spending’ provides a contextual setting for urban domestic behaviour in the first century CE. Therefore behaviour and agency can be modelled to address concepts such as social identity, consumer perception and motivation.
This research provides an innovative method to investigate the relationships between consumer durables, perceptions and behaviour in the ancient world. The potential for the application of the constructs addressed is not limited to site-specific contexts or periods, and addresses problematic issues such as consumer involvements with acquired goods.
