Abstract
The rise of the state in Ancient Italy went hand in hand with an increase in infrastructural power i.e. settlement centralization and urbanization. The paper discusses theoretical challenges and introduces a modeling approach to a case study, one of the earliest cities in Southern Italy, Pontecagnano, with the aim of understanding the community dynamics at the time of the earliest urbanization (ca. 900-600 BC). The model is a two-mode model that derives from social network analysis, an approach that has been fruitfully adapted to archaeological research. The model is applied to detect trends in burial contexts from the community involved. Burial was, at that time, in the region, a key instrument in the creation of memory and display of status and thus for building and consolidating state power. The analytical network model is able to detect the dynamics in the community over time very well: network Cohesion is expanding and contracting, and points to the existence of tension and a tight control of funerary behavior. The study of Centrality of selected nodes provides a good understanding of the strategies in terms of the circulation of key resources. The latter is particularly significant for studying urbanization because the appropriation of resources was not possible without centralization and the development of infrastructure, as well as an ideology. Based on the study of selected resources it is suggested that an increase in crop storage has played a particular role in the development of state power and the urbanization process at Pontecagnano. In due course, the paper also addresses methodological challenges of working with fragmented datasets when applying models to study the past.
Highlights
The appearance of cities sparked a process of deep transformation in the Ancient World
The first scholar to write extensively about the Ancient City, Fustel de Coulange (1980), is indicative for the general approach to urbanization as a historical process: “. . . just as several phratries were united in a tribe, several tribes might associate together, on the condition that the religion of each should be respected
Through the systematic analysis of burial contexts of the ancient city of Pontecagnano, it was attempted to gain a better understanding of the urbanization processes in Ancient Italy
Summary
The appearance of cities sparked a process of deep transformation in the Ancient World. This checklist approach remained in favor for many decades among archaeologists and only more recently have more subtle ways of tackling the question of the nature and coming into being of Ancient Cities been proposed for the Mediterranean (Damgaard Andersen, 1997; Osborne and Cunliffe, 2005) Mediterranean urbanization, it was proposed, should be seen as a complex process of social, economic and political transformation in which two parallel dynamics are at work: state formation and settlement nucleation. Even though the original process of tie formation, e.g., co-attendance, marriage, or business cannot be detected by archaeologists, similarities in the material world can act as a proxy for social interaction and can be studied in terms of markers of community formation. Relevant for the case study are: Cohesion and Centrality, whose definition and analysis are reported below
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