Analyser les réseaux du passé en archéologie et en histoire

Au cours de la dernière décennie, de plus en plus d'archéologues ont utilisé des méthodes formelles d'analyse de réseaux, tant pour explorer des bases données complexes que pour tester leurs hypothèses à propos des interactions du passé. La tendance a été la même en histoire, autour de l'analyse de réseaux sociaux ayant laissé des traces textuelles. Mais les deux disciplines, qui pourtant partagent l'objectif de comprendre des comportements humains passés, ont peu dialogué à propos de ce nouvel intérêt pour les réseaux. Les journées The Connected Past, qui ont eu lieu à Southampton en mars 2012, avaient pour objectif d'ouvrir ce dialogue. À l'issue de ces journées, nous présentons ici les questions, largement communes mais pour partie propres à chaque discipline, ouvertes par l'usage de techniques d'analyse de réseaux en archéologie et en histoire. Nous faisons le pari que la recherche en la matière, dans chaque discipline, peut bénéficier de l'expérience de l'autre. Les questions et problèmes communs ont trait au caractère fragmentaire des sources, à la manière de prendre en compte, dans la visualisation et l'analyse, les dimensions spatiale et temporelle des réseaux, et plus généralement à la manière d'interpréter les résultats de ces analyses de façon à mieux comprendre les interactions passées. L'archéologie se distingue dans la mesure où les traces matérielles sur lesquelles elle travaille ne donnent qu'un accès indirect aux individus, mais permettent en contrepartie d'avoir un aperçu de changements de long terme de la vie quotidienne. Au contraire, les sources historiques offrent souvent des perspectives plus synchroniques d'analyse de réseaux, pour un moment précis du passé, centrées sur des personnes identifiées par leur nom et leur rôle social. Toutefois, les interactions documentées par les sources historiques et archéologiques ne sont pas uniquement interpersonnelles. Les points des réseaux des archéologues et des historiens peuvent aussi bien être des mots, des textes, des artefacts ou des lieux. Outre l'intérêt du dialogue entre les deux disciplines, les journées The Connected Past ont de ce fait souligné la nécessité d'une réflexion sur cette extension, et sur la traduction qu'elle implique pour des concepts sociologiques définis à l'origine à propos d'interactions entre individus. L'analyse de réseaux en histoire et en archéologie ne peut donc pas se passer des savoir-faire, notamment de critique textuelle et matérielle, propres à chaque discipline.The last decade has seen a significant increase in the use of network studies in archaeology, as archaeologists have turned to formal network methods to make sense of large and complex datasets and to explore hypotheses of past interactions. A similar pattern can be seen in history and related disciplines, where work has focused on exploring the structure of textual sources and analysing historically attested social networks. Despite this shared interest in network approaches and their common general goal (to understand human behaviour in the past), there has been little cross-fertilisation of archaeological and historical network approaches. The Connected Past, a multidisciplinary conference held in Southampton in March 2012, provided a rare platform for such cross-disciplinary communication. This article will discuss the shared concerns of and seemingly unique challenges facing archaeologists and historians using network analysis techniques, and will suggest new ways in which research in both disciplines can be enhanced by drawing on the experiences of different research traditions. The conference brought some common themes and shared concerns to the fore. Most prominent among these are possible methods for dealing with the fragmentary nature of our sources, techniques for visualising and analysing past networks - especially when they include both spatial and temporal dimensions - and interpretation of network analysis results in order to enhance our understanding of past social interactions. This multi-disciplinary discussion also raised some fundamental differences between disciplines: in archaeology, individuals are typically identified indirectly through the material remains they leave behind, providing an insight into long-term changes in the everyday lives of past peoples; in contrast, historical sources often allow the identification of past individuals by name and role, allowing synchronic analysis of social networks at a particular moment in time. The conference also demonstrated clearly that a major concern for advancing the use of network analysis in both the archaeological and historical disciplines will be the consideration of how to translate sociological concepts that have been created to deal with interaction between people when the nodes in our networks are in fact words, texts, places or artefacts. Means of textual and material critique will thus be central to future work in this field

Networks and Religious Innovation in the Roman Empire

Why do some religious movements succeed and spread, while others, seemingly equally popular and successful at a certain time, ultimately fail? It is from this starting point that this thesis approaches religious success or failure in the Roman Empire: exploring a new analytical method for understanding religious change: network theory. The thesis forms two parts. Part I sets out the theoretical frameworks. The focus of network theory is on the processes by which innovation spreads: how interconnectedness facilitates change. Although some innovations might be ‘superior’, viewing success or failure as the result of interplay between inherent qualities of a religious movement and the structure of the social environment in which it is embedded means it is possible to reduce value judgements about superiority or inferiority. The discussion then turns to religious change. The key point is that sociologists of religion can explain something of the processes of religious conversion (or ‘recruitment’) and the success or failure of a religious movement through an analysis of social interactions. Finally, I explain how I shall use networks both as a heuristic approach and a practical modelling technique to apply to the epigraphic data, and detail some of the previous application of networks to archaeological test cases. Part II applies these methods to the epigraphic data of three religions. In Chapter Four, I examine the cult Jupiter Dolichenus, arguing that the previous explanations for the success of the cult are untenable, showing from the epigraphy that the cult spread through a strong-tie network of Roman military officials. In Chapter Five, I look at the development of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, showing that, during the second century AD, Diaspora Jews began to actively display their Jewish identity in their epitaphs. I argue that this re-Judaization represents the ‘activation’ of an ethno-cultural network, as a response to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba rebellion; the visible remains of the rabbinic reforms. In Chapter Six, I discuss the cult of the ‘Highest God’, Theos Hypsistos, taking Mitchell’s argument further to suggest that the huge increase in the dedications during the second-third centuries is not simply a reflection of the epigraphic habit, but rather, that the cult of Hypsistos was swelled by the Gentile god-fearers, as a result of the changes happening within Judaism itself at this time.AHR

Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation

The application of method and theory from network science to archaeology has dramatically increased over the last decade. In this article, we document this growth over time, discuss several of the important concepts that are used in the application of network approaches to archaeology, and introduce the other articles in this special issue on networks in archaeology. We argue that the suitability and contribution of network science techniques within particular archaeological research contexts can be usefully explored by scrutinizing the past phenomena under study, how these are abstracted into concepts, and how these in turn are represented as network data. For this reason, each of the articles in this special issue is discussed in terms of the phenomena that they seek to address, the abstraction in terms of concepts that they use to study connectivity, and the representations of network data that they employ in their analyses. The approaches currently being used are diverse and interdisciplinary, which we think are evidence of a healthy exploratory stage in the application of network science in archaeology. To facilitate further innovation, application, and collaboration, we also provide a glossary of terms that are currently being used in network science and especially those in the applications to archaeological case studies

Religious Networks in the Roman Empire

The first three centuries AD saw the spread of new religious ideas through the Roman Empire, crossing a vast and diverse geographical, social and cultural space. In this innovative study, Anna Collar explores both how this happened and why. Drawing on research in the sociology and anthropology of religion, physics and computer science, Collar explores the relationship between social networks and religious transmission to explore why some religious movements succeed, while others, seemingly equally successful at a certain time, ultimately fail. Using extensive epigraphic data, Collar provides new interpretations of the diffusion of ideas across the social networks of the Jewish Diaspora and the cults of Jupiter Dolichenus and Theos Hypsistos, and in turn offers important reappraisals of the spread of religious innovations in the Roman Empire. This study will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of ancient history, archaeology, ancient religion and network theory.</jats:p