The Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative
The Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative (MCI) is the first project to combine social network and geospatial analyses to examine ancient globalization. As scholars focus on the trade and social networks that shaped the Mediterranean, the question of how to conceive of the sea as a whole has come into the foreground. Work in this area has been largely divided between two scales: macro and micro. Recent research suggests that modern theories of globalization can be applied to the ancient world, offering a new perspective on Mediterranean-wide cultural shifts.
These discussions, however, function more as meta-arguments about social connectivity. Others, including this project’s directors, have examined globalization at a local level, embedding their discussions of large-scale change in specific case studies without explaining how these examples fit into a bigger methodological picture But thus far, humanistic study has failed to integrate these two scales of analysis, leaving local experience and global shifts as two separate scholarly discussions.
Our research bridges this gap by grounding large-scale social networks in textual and archaeological remains with digital methods to address key historical and archaeological questions. Over the past three years, our staff of archaeologists, historians, cartographers, data specialists, and students has developed and refined a new way to combine existing tools and better exploit the geospatial capabilities of the open-source social network analysis platform Gephi to visualize these ancient trading, religious, and kinship networks more clearly. The attraction of using Gephi lies in its ability to make formerly invisible connections visible, to illuminate the shifting potentialities of social and religious networks that may not be revealed by more traditional archaeological or historical investigations. This innovative methodology thus offers new avenues for analyzing and describing the way that individuals and groups navigated the landscape of the Mediterranean, participating in broader conversations in the humanities around how global political and economic structures interact with local cultures, conditions, and groups.
