Social Networks and Regional Identity in Bronze Age Italy

This innovative book uses social network analysis to trace the origins of pre-Roman Italian peoples from their earliest exchange networks.

This book takes an innovative approach to analyzing the archaeological record, tracing the origins of Italian regional groups to the Bronze Age, much earlier than traditionally thought. Emma Blake applies social network analysis to reconstruct previously unrecognized regional exchange networks, bridging the divide between prehistory and the Classical world in Italy.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.