Exploring formal SNA approaches to funerary contexts in Early Iron Age Italy
Lieve Donnellan
Abstract This paper explores various possible ways to analyse evidence from funerary contexts with formal SNA methods. Despite the availability of large datasets from grave yards of the Early Iron Age in the Mediterranean, formal SNA has hardly ever been applied to this type of data. Research of funerary contexts has traditionally focussed on typologies of objects and tombs, and the religious meanings of death, but a formal SNA has the potential to contribute significantly to the scholarly understanding of a number of aspects, going from trends in the overall population, the evolution of such trends through time, to social stratification strategies, such as social distance through ritual performance, and intercultural interaction. The paper presents a summary of the analysis from two case-studies from Campania (the sites of Pithekoussai and Pontecagnano), whose funerary data sets have been digitised and subsequently analysed with SNA software. Various analytic tools, offered by standard SNA software packages, allow to ask and reassess several questions pertaining to the social make-up and interaction of the populations in question. The paper focusses especially on methodological questions and problems in translating conventionally-published excavation data, deriving from funerary contexts, to digital datasets that can be analysed with formal, quantitative methods. It also elaborates on some tools, available in standard SNA packages, that can be used to study social and cultural interaction in past populations.
