98 Anna C. F. Collar
and indirectly through abstract rhetorical avenues, may have played in the dissemina-
tion of ideas and ideologies connected with an understanding of ethnic identity. In this
way, I hope to demonstrate the value of using a network approach, and to show how
discussions of ethnic identity can be enriched by thinking through the metaphor of
the network.
Network Methodologies and Antiquity
Network is an increasingly popular term in both the academic and non-academic
worlds. The phrase “social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter” is heard
almost daily on the UK’s premier radio news broadcasting channel, BBC Radio 4,
and the past few years have seen an unprecedented and real social power enacted
through such democratizing networked Internet sites: the green almost-revolution in
Iran in 2009 was driven in large part by Twitter (Washington Times, June 16 2009),
and the events of the “Arab spring” in 2011 were fuelled and spread by messages,
photographs, videos, and organization through social media. With the advent of the
use and discussion of networks and their power to foster change in our daily lives, it
is no surprise then that the academic community is also starting to ride the current
network wave: theories exploring the properties and power of various different types
of network are being developed by researchers working across a number of fields,
including mathematics, physics, sociology, and computer science. These advances in
network analysis are based on a long tradition of research in many disciplines, but, with
the increasing ubiquity of powerful computing technology, network perspectives and
methodologies are now becoming understood and used more broadly across the sciences
and humanities.
These huge advances in computing over the last decade or so means that, in recent
years in archaeology and ancient history, much research has been done on the power
of networks in antiquity. Network methodologies are being used to try to understand
social relationships in the past, interactions across geographical regions, as well as
technical relationships in large and complex datasets. The problems and potential
inherent in these datasets have stimulated the use of various techniques from network
analysis as a tool for exploring these data, and such applications are already proving
to be innovative and fruitful approaches to topics such as cognitive and social material
networks (Knappett 2005; 2011); interregional interactions (Graham 2006; Isaksen
2008); human evolution (Coward 2010); the spread of belief systems (Collar 2011;
2013a; 2013b); the emergence of towns through the prism of trade (Sindbæk 2007);
the creation of identity (Malkin 2003, 2011); and maritime connectivity and settlement
(Broodbank 2000).
Although applications of networks to ancient data have been very heterogeneous
and often somewhat loose and metaphorical, “differences in method are not neces-
sarily problematic as network analysis itself is a collective term, combining a number
of ideas and quantitative tools from several disciplines” (Brughmans 2010: 2).