This week was dedicated to a major upcoming theme in Archaeology, which is networks, more properly spelled out as Social Networks Analysis or SNA. We read and discussed key paper by Carl Knappett and Tom Brughmans, which both provide generic overviews, before we turned to Irad Malkin’s A Small Greek World. (CUP, 2011).
While the connections between networks and migration seems all too obvious in the case of the ancient Greek colonial world, we struggled to pinpoint how and where such links may be made. Another case study discussed concerned ancient road systems, which we examined in Roman Egypt and in late Roman Andalusia (Spain) through papers by Gates-Foster and Isaksen.
In the end, we remain to be convinced of the usefulness of networks for studying migrants, although we may come back to them.