From Networks to Society: Pottery Style and Hegemony in Bronze Age Southern Italy

Abstract

During the last two decades, the use of network methodologies in archaeological studies of interaction has gradually emerged. In this paper I will explore the social significance of networks, advocating the explicit use of Marxist-inspired social theory to increase our understanding of the patterns recognized through graph-theory. Crucial in this will be the new concepts of Means, Relations and Modes of Interaction and the Gramscian notion of hegemony. I will illustrate the potential of this approach, through a case study based in MBA and LBA southern Italy, focused on the sharing of stylistic features in pottery from Apulia in a period when the region was one of the loci of interaction with Minoan/Mycenaean Greece. Local pottery networks show the existence of intense interaction since the early phases of the MBA, before the main period of contact with the Aegean world. It is argued that such networks were influenced by the growing Aegean presence in the region and the overall hegemony of this wide cultural component. Through the later phases of the Late Bronze Age the level of local interaction further increases, while at the same time Aegean-type pottery almost disappears, suggesting a less hegemonic role for Aegean groups involved and a re-balancing of interaction.

Coinage networks in fifth-century BCE Ionia

“…Among the successes of the sixth century and Ionia's 'Golden Age', a strong regional economy is understood from the quantity and range of coinage produced in this place at this time. The first Aegean coinage is attributed to Ionian communities, with the suggested emergence of this new technology being between the late seventh and midsixth centuries BCE (Weidauer 1975;Furtwängler 1982;Kroll, Waggoner 1984;Wallace 1987;Carradice, Price 1988: 20;Bammer 1990;Williams 1991;Howgego 1995;Weissl 2002;2005;Wartenberg, Fischer-Bossert 2016); the latest research puts the first coinage of Ionia in the seventh century, at 650-625 BCE (Kerschner 2020;Kerschner, Konuk 2020;cf. Rutter 2021).…”

Pottery decor as networks on the Middle Niger

“…324-330) justify their building of networks based on pottery décor similarity by arguing for décors as signals in which both group membership and individual skill are expressed. Iacono (2016), on the other hand, takes the cooccurrence of pottery decoration as analogous to other forms of social encounters, and thus as representative of them, conveying the agency of individuals "simply through sensory recognition" (Iacono 2016, p. 126). We would like to stress here that these differences are in no small part due to the history of research and the nature of the archaeological record in different parts of the world, and that the building of network models on archaeological data always requires a well-theorised foundation appropriate to the historical context of the studied material.…”

Social Network Analysis in Archaeology

“…Anthony 1990). The infancy of a relational, structural approach without agency, practice, or meaning placed SNA outside of mainstream anthropological analyses-including archaeology-even as use of network metaphors and other relational approaches increased in archaeology (e.g., Hutson 2010, Watts ed. 2013).…”