Going Deeper: Can We Use Network Approaches to Reconstruct Memory, Meaning and Emotion?

Summary

Understanding our past needs more than the long lens of nodes, links, and centrality measures: archaeology is bound to people’s things and people’s places. Although network analysis is concerned with relationships, it has not yet been harnessed to approach the meaning, memory and emotion encoded in our relationships with things and places. We must address this by ensuring that our network analyses incorporate these aspects of lived experience and make meaningful contributions to advancing the archaeological narrative. This paper explores how we might build a methodology for humanised archaeological network analysis in which the lived experiences of people in places and with material culture are considered as an 'entanglement of lines, not a connecting of points' (Ingold 2007: 81). I will focus on the material associated with Syrian cults in the Roman world, using different network approaches at a range of scales in combination to present place as a complex, ongoing result of multiple intertwined networks of experience, emotion, memory, narrative, material and landscape. Network analysis is only part of this project - which begins to look more like Ingold’s meshwork or a ‘deep map’.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21980