Social Networks and Regional Identity in Bronze Age Italy

by Emma Blake

Overview

This book takes an innovative approach to detecting regional groupings in peninsular Italy during the Late Bronze Age, a notoriously murky period of Italian prehistory. Applying social network analysis to the distributions of imports and other distinctive objects, Emma Blake reveals previously unrecognized exchange networks that are in some cases the precursors of the named peoples of the first millennium BC: the Etruscans, the Veneti, and others. In a series of regional case studies, she uses quantitative methods to both reconstruct and analyze the character of these early networks and posits that, through path dependence, the initial structure of the networks played a role in the success or failure of the groups occupying those same regions in later times. This book thus bridges the divide between Italian prehistory and the Classical period, and demonstrates that Italy's regionalism began far earlier than previously thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107063204
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/11/2014
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	7.24(w) x 10.31(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Emma Blake is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She has published widely on prehistoric Italy, on such topics as monumentality, identity, space and spatiality, social memory, and culture contract. She has conducted fieldwork in Sardinia and co-directs the Marsala Hinterland Survey, in Sicily.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: the problem of Italy's ancient peoples; 2. Imports and specialized products in Italy in the recent and final Bronze Ages; 3. Group identity in prehistory: theory, interactions, and social networks; 4. The recent and final Bronze Age peninsular networks: assessing structure and cohesion; 5. The northern networks from the Terramare to the Veneto; 6. West central Italy: networks and neighbors; 7. Marche, Umbria, and the Apennine Mountain muddle; 8. Southern Italy: networks by land and by sea; 9. Conclusions and aftermath.

Editorial Reviews

'… Emma Blake’s book is special … this is an important book, both for the development of network analysis in archaeology as for our understanding of prehistoric Italy.' Gert Jan van Wijngaarden, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

'Blake’s work is innovative and establishes a convincing link between social practices and identity formation. The book provides a good example of the application of network analysis in archaeology - technically detailed but also simply and clearly explained. The theoretical framework builds on a detailed archaeological and historical foundation.' Francesca Fulminante, Antiquity

From the Publisher