A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Networks and Ethnogenesis 109

Future Developments

This brief chapter has shown that network methodologies can be used in a variety of ways
to reveal interesting and innovative approaches to ancient ethnicities. However, ethno-
genesis is a controversial topic and an extremely complex process, with multiple factors
contributing to a people’s sense of themselves—migration, language, religion, shared his-
tory, and so on. We must be careful in our application of networks to the past; we must
avoid skimming over issues such as data incompleteness, and we must consider different
factors of identity as separate network aspects, which may help us to avoid masking the
subtleties of ancient ethnogenetic processes and the multiplicity of perspectives that eth-
nic identity shelters. Network methodologies are still at an early stage of application in
archaeology and ancient history—and deeper understanding of network properties and
problems and further case studies to test the methods are necessary to reveal new and
illuminating insights about past social networks, and past social phenomena.

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