Network analyses have seen a dramatic increase in popularity in archaeology over the last decade. Networks have long been used as a metaphor, and relational thinking is certainly not new to archaeology, but there is still much to be done to develop approaches that profitably combine relational theories with formal network analyses at various spatial and social scales. This book is an attempt to explore some of the potential connections between network techniques and general models of social interaction using archaeological data.
This edited volume was inspired by a discussion session at the 2017 European Archaeology Association annual meeting. The chapters are varied, and they focus on an array of topics revolving around how to construct, interpret, and visualize relations as formal networks using case studies from Europe as well as one from North America. The chapters run the gamut of current work on network thinking in archaeology, ranging from discussions of theoretical concepts or tentative attempts to evaluate and formalize relational theories using network tools to empirical evaluations of networks using quantitative approaches such as partitioning, centrality analysis, and comparisons of generative network models. In general, the first half of the book leans more heavily on theoretical discussion, and the second half more heavily on empirical examples.
Although the chapters are diverse, there are a few key themes that most chapters touch on to varying degrees. These studies are concerned with the ways interpersonal social relations can be analyzed using network tools, as well as the tensions among investigations of social relations at micro versus meso versus regional scales. Many of the chapters consider the role of objects in mediating interactions among people as well as the potential blurring of boundaries between people and things that can occur in social transactions. Indeed, objects are treated as active participants in interaction throughout most of the volume.
Several chapters rely on approaches to thinking about social interaction from other fields, including Marilyn Strathern's ethnographic work in Melanesia, which focuses on the ontologies of face-to-face networks and the complexities of personhood in transactions involving people, animals, and objects. Carl Knappett provides a detailed discussion of this theoretical approach and considers how it could be applied through formal network methods. Chapters by Aline Deicke and Owain Morris take on these ideas directly and apply them to empirical case studies. Other chapters take inspiration from other relational models focused on interaction and identity (Simon Barker, Simona Perna, and Courtney A. Ward's is focused on marble pavements from the Roman town of Pompeii) or the social values ascribed to objects (Lieve Donnellan's is on Pithekoussai—off the coast of Italy—widely thought to have been a Greek colony). Importantly, all of these authors note the difficulty in directly mapping such complex relational concepts onto formal networks, but they suggest that considerations of both theoretical models and formal analyses together may be useful in making more nuanced interpretations of interactions and their associations.
Several of these chapters explore methods for constructing two-mode networks and associated affiliation networks where sets of actors are not connected directly but instead are connected through objects involved in transactions among them. In his chapter on beadwork in Viking Age Scandinavia, Søren Sindbæk directly compares the utility of two-mode networks to traditional approaches for evaluating interaction with material culture in detail. Although many have suggested that such approaches are a good fit for archaeological data, specific applications have been rare. The prevalence of two-mode approaches in this book reflects the deep focus on objects as active parts of interactions and network formation, and it points to potential new directions for future research.
The final two chapters—one by Mark A. Hill, Kevin C. Nolan, and Mark S. Seeman on Hopewell social interactions, and another chapter by Francesca Fulminate on Iron Age Italy—provide the most detailed empirical analyses in the book, and both represent attempts at evaluating models of interaction at regional scales with reference to formal networks created from lithic materials and transportation infrastructure respectively. These chapters highlight how network metrics and structural properties can be used to select among alternative explanations for the underlying social processes generating interactions in a given context.
This volume provides a good discussion of trends in recent archaeological network literature in Europe as well as the history of such approaches, although work in other parts of the world is not extensively considered. It is unfortunate that the figures are black and white—several are difficult to evaluate in this format—but this is a problem for network studies in general. Overall, Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction provides a useful distillation of recent research on networks in archaeology and the complexities of connecting relational theories with formal networks using archaeological data.
