Meaningful Networks: Who Do You Trust?

This is the keynote lecture for 2024 conference of The Connected Past: People, Networks and Complexity in Archaeology and History.

Network analysis in archaeology should always recall its material basis: models are proxies for real people's real-life interactions. With past religion, it is even more pressing to reattach network analysis to lived realities, the social relationships which maintained communities, the bonds of trust which constitute neighbourliness, friendship, and love. Trusted relationships enable the spread of new ideas about the divine, new ideological norms, about belief and its manifestations. Bringing strong social ties back into network analysis in archaeology also ushers in these human qualities: emotional connections and meaning contained within unfeeling nodes and edges. This paper outlines how we might identify the different capacities of different kinds of strong tie in the past, and the places or occasions where such interactions take place---such as festivals and sanctuaries; the narratives which bind communities of belief or practice together; and the systemic use of strong ties for ideological purposes.

Anna Collar is an associate professor in Roman Archaeology at the University of Southampton. She works on the material culture of religious practice, pilgrimage, sacred landscapes, mobility and migration, emotion and experience, social networks and network analysis. She is a pioneer in the use of social network analytical methods to interpret religious movements in antiquity, and a founding member of The Connected Past. She has numerous publications on the application of network approaches in archaeology, notably Networks and the Spread of Ideas in the Past (2022), The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History (with Tom Brughmans and Fiona Coward, 2016), and Religious Networks in the Roman Empire (2013).