Love thy (Middle Bronze Age) neighbor: A network model for central and northern Greece
[ 1 ] Ośrodek Archeologii Starożytnej Grecji i Rzymu, Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk | [ P ] pracownik
2023
artykuł naukowy
angielski
EN A century of archaeology has identified hundreds of potential sites north of the Corinthian Isthmus on the Greek mainland and in the northeast Aegean contemporary with the Middle Helladic–Late Helladic I Period (MH–LH I, ca. 2100–1550 BC). This paper presents an exploratory nearest neighbor network model to examine connectivity in a scenario where maritime movement included widespread access to the sail (known from the wider Aegean). Analysis of clustering and centrality in the modeled network shows that nodes along the Euboean Gulf were the most important for overall connectivity, and that seemingly geographically isolated sites in the Sporades archipelago and Chalkidiki were crucial for integrating the northern Aegean with central Greece. The later Late Bronze Age palatial centers of Thebes, Orchomenos, and Dimini/Volos on the other hand do not score highly on any centrality measure in this scenario, suggesting that their inherent position on the modeled network did not greatly contribute to their eventual success. This observation is in line with recent scholarship, increasingly pointing to an important endogenous aspect to emerging complexity in central Greece.
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