A Scale-Free, Relational Approach to Social Development in Late-Prehistoric Tyrrhenian Central Italy.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the interplay between relational patterns and trajectories of social development within late-prehistoric Tyrrhenian Central Italy (TCI). Despite historical disagreement, TCI is now recognized as a context of radical social transformations leading to or even encompassing the formation of states and cities. Between the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (12th-8th centuries BCE), in concert with substantial changes attested in the funerary record, hundreds of small settlements distributed evenly across the research area were replaced by a few large and formally heterogeneous centers. Based on a narrow evidentiary range, these developments tend to be viewed in terms of differential progression along a single axis of complexity, with the emerging centers categorized according to apparent scale and historical prominence.

The aim of this work is not to establish TCI as a case of state formation and urbanization according to one or another definition. Following anthropological perspectives that emphasize the importance of parsing the dynamics underlying qualitative changes in the form of social collectives, I focus on tracing developmental trajectories within a systematically validated relational plane as a first step toward identifying better bases for comparison, categorization, and ultimately explanation. In practice, I derive large datasets for network reconstruction from the TCI mortuary record and apply tools developed for the study of complex networks to track the position of social collectives over time and extract summary measures of relational distance. I use these measures to evaluate three aspects of the transformations attested between the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age: 1) the degree of local and regional coordination involved in the shift from a large number of small villages to relatively few large centers; 2) the impact of shifting axes of long-distance exchange on local relational patterns; and 3) the relationship between the formal characteristics and internal substance of the new settlements. I conclude that the watershed changes attested across the research area can be understood in reference to uniform endogenous processes leading to the emergence of comparable social collectives.