Physical And Relational Networks In The Aegean Bronze Age

In this paper we present a new interdisciplinary perspective on regional interaction patterns in archaeological contexts. It combines insights from graph theory, social network analysis and statistical physics to treat the interactions between sites in geographical space in terms of a network which minimises an associated Hamiltonian. To explore the various issues involved a case study from a heterogeneous physical environment is chosen, the archipelago environment of the southernAegean, in particular the rich dataset of the Aegean Bronze Age. Our findings are of broader relevance for the study of interaction networks, as the use of statistical physics in this fashion represents a novel application in social science contexts. Published on CD as Evans, T.S., Knappett, C., Rivers, R.J., “Physical and Relational Networks in the Aegean Bronze Age”, in the Proceedings of The European Conference on Complex Systems, 2006 (ECCS 06), eds. J. Jost, F. Reed-Tsochas and P. Schuster, ISBN 0-9554123-0-7 and 13-978-0-9554123-0-1, p.81.