 Hello, dear colleagues and friends. It's a pleasure and a honor for me to introduce Karl Knapitz, a keynote lecturer. In particular, as I am an archaeologist working on the Mediterranean and on connectivity, and Karl Knapitz research has strongly shaped our present view of material culture and of networks as materialized through archaeological data. He holds the Watergram Homer Thompson Chair in the Gen Prehistory at the University of Toronto, where he also directs the Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization. In his trajectory, I remind his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, 1997, during a period in which heretical discussion was evolving from post-processualism to agency theory and the discussion about materiality entanglements. His research has a historical side on Minoan pottery, and he recently developed his field research in the Minoan town of Palaecus Road, with a focus on the processes of urbanization and landscaping in Crete and the Gen area. And he has a theoretical side, which we know may be even better, that is on material culture theory and network approaches in archaeology. What is absolutely relevant, I think, is the strict integration of the perspective in his study of Mediterranean connectivity. And so his reflection about social network analysis and the connectivity is going on, is proceeding, and I only wanted to quote something from a paper that he published this year in the book by Liv Donilon, edited by Liv Donilon on archaeological networks and social interaction. There he says that network analysis does not have an adequate set of models for addressing the micro-scale or face-to-face interactions, and that this limitation is in part because of a lack of consideration of the active role of artifacts in mediating such interactions. So we know that his keynote will be basically discussing a factor of scale. And so looking at these recent considerations he raised, I very much look forward to hearing how far he has already moved in his theoretically oriented path of reflection about archaeology. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much, Alessandro, for that kind introduction. To give you my talk in a nutshell, I want to talk about a current experience of networking, then say a few words about sociology's viewpoint on networks. Use that to think about the ways we approach ancient networks, and finally to come back to the present and reflect upon our networked lives. So in our everyday experience through this pandemic, we act as if there are two kinds of networking that are separable, the in-person networks that connect us locally and the virtual networks that connect us globally. If the former are small, slow and resilient, the latter are massive, fast and fragile. So this distinction between slow and fast is kind of what's the purpose behind my title. But though we may concede that the pandemic has accentuated these differences by forcing us to constrain in-person interactions while expanding virtual connectivity, it also seems likely that we were already thinking like this. How else could the transition have occurred so rapidly? How else could conferences like this have pivoted by completely removing the in-person element? While detached, contained and isolated in our bunkers, completely un-networked at one level, we already believed we could remain networked to one another. But this separation of the micro-scale from the macro-scale is not only something we experience, but also a problem we encounter analytically. If we turn to the most relevant field for such questions, namely sociology, there is an acute recognition of the possible analytical split between micro and macro scales. And such a split is quite pronounced, even within a subfield concerned specifically with networking, i.e. social network analysis. Emily Erickson, a sociologist, argues that, and here I quote, there are in fact two distinct theoretical frameworks that animate much of the work on social networks. She calls them relationalism and formalism. With relationalism, the content of ties between individuals is crucial to the formation of social networks. That is to say, the very basis of a tie matters. Erickson uses the example of McLean's work on Renaissance Florentine networks, in which he shows that particular cultural frames, such as honor, were manipulated to construct relationships. And if we think about friendship networks today, the cultural frame might be for teenagers' TikTok. With formalism, on the other hand, it is abstracted forms that come before content. Marriage would be one example that is a form which may contain different content, a wide range of feelings, and which can be analyzed structurally somewhat regardless of that content. Which might be like connecting up teenagers in a school in networks solely on the basis of their structural connection, their belonging to that school. What might we say about these two approaches? Relationalism seems to be bottom-up and more micro-scale, while formalism is top-down and macro-scale. What Erickson is doing in distinguishing between these two theoretical frameworks is warning against simple attempts to reconcile them. She is showing that the differences between them are quite deep and actually go back to Simo and Moss. But what's the relevance for archaeology? Well, social network analysis has been a major influence, of course, on the uptake of network archaeology. And it seems that it is the formalist rather than the relationalist framework that has been most prevalent. So let us just see how this is the case. Network analysis has seen quite a boom in the last decade in our field. It has proven invaluable in describing and explaining relations, connections, and interactions across a range of settings from prehistory to ancient history, even more modern historical context, and across many parts of the globe. One of the main trends that could be identified is an overriding focus on regional and interregional scales of interaction, whereby sites are the nodes in the network and their interactions are the links in the network. We might briefly look at some network visualisation visualisations from various studies to see how this is the case. We could look at the really groundbreaking study by Barbara Mills, Matt Peoples, and other colleagues in the US Southwest from about 1250 to 1450, and with a huge database and able to come up with really convincing historical explanations for phenomena such as migration. We might also mention the work of Mark Golidko and colleagues in the Maya world looking at obsidian sources and where those different forms of obsidian are used site by site and then coming up with networks on that basis. We could talk about, we could go to the Baltic and Soran-Sinbac's fascinating work on Viking networks. And in the Mediterranean, there are various examples, but we might just mention Emma Blake's study of networks, the prefigure, the Roman world that emerge over time in the Bronze Age and Iron Age and the Italian Peninsula. We might, risking oversimplification, call all of these examples of formalism. Such formalism is perhaps a natural consequence of the influence of social network analysis. There is another set of influences upon network approaches in archaeology, more from the direction of social physics and network science. Here we can see the impact of computer science, formal modeling, the attractiveness of big data or in archaeology, I suppose it's quasi-big data in most cases, and even a quest for explanation over understanding that comes more with the territory of the natural sciences. These influences have perhaps cemented the association of network archaeology with formalism. And here, I'd really like to acknowledge the input of Angus Moll of Leiden with whom I've been working on some of these questions for a review, kind of a review paper that will appear in a new Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research with these editors, with dozens of chapters that I think will be very interesting. However, we must not forget the relationalist strand of thinking identified by Emily Erickson, the sociologist. This theoretical framework of relationalism is also present in archaeology. It can be found in the work on relational personhood by scholars such as Chris Fowler and Joe Brook, who are identified in part by Struthern's divisual and in approaches to agency that draw on actor network theory. Yet these more interpretive approaches in archaeology tend not to engage all that much with network perspectives. One strong exception is the work of Astrid van Oyen, who takes such interpretive perspectives and seeks to put them in dialogue with more formal network approaches. She is critical of the latter for their tendency to assume pre-existing categories. For van Oyen, it's important to understand how categories come into being relationally, specifically in her research on Teresa Gelata. You might also cite here the work of Gisle Palsen on Icelandic historical land registers. He too recognises the need for a relationalist perspective and identifies assemblage theory as promising in this regard, characterising it as a qualitative network approach. However, Palsen believes that it is quite possible to both be concerned with matters of agency and the bottom-up generation of relationships and conduct formal network analysis. In this, he differs somewhat from van Oyen. While Palsen seeks connections with assemblage theory, another related approach is seen in the work of Angus Mull. I just mentioned. Looking to combine the relationalism of entanglement theory with more formalist approaches, one could cite not only his work with Ian Hodder on formalising tanglegrams as networks, but also that with Flores Keenan, that explicitly seeks to link up micro and macro scales in an analysis of the colonial entanglements of the Spanish-Caribbean encounter. While these two studies on Iceland and the Caribbean use historical documents, my next few examples are based on artefacts. A fascinating study by Geomy and Peoples looks at artefact classes found at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon and examines their co-occurrences and their room-by-room associations. The authors are able, in this way, to identify two scales of ritual behaviour through their practice-based assemblage-oriented approach, though they do not use assemblage in the same DeLandian theoretical sense as Palsen. Camilla Matsukato, completing her PhD at Stanford in her study of the Neolithic site of Chatlhujok in Anatolia, also takes this kind of micro-level approach by connecting up buildings and the objects and features found within them. Houses that share similar finds are linked together and are suggestive of sub-communities within the settlement. Her approach, though strong on network methodology, is also very much compatible with the entanglement perspective developed by Ian Hodder. Lastly, I might mention a recent University of Toronto PhD by Paula Giorgiati on Aegean Bronze Age exchange networks with a method that ranges from the micro-scale of particular artefact co-presences within a site to regional-level patterns. Do such archaeological efforts at epistemological bridge-building succeed in overcoming the kinds of worries Ericsson has about the incompatibility of formalism and relationalism? They differ principally in their position on the status of a priori social forms, such that, and I quote again, formalism embraces and relationalism largely rejects the initial premise of the existence of the a priori. So looking at the slide, one might see that it's really a question of saying that formalism says yes to a priori social forms and relationalism essentially says no. Ericsson argues that any attempt at bridging formalism and relationalism has to address the underlying tensions and she sees a few different approaches or ways out of this impasse, such as simply choosing one or the other approach, allowing for theoretical pluralism or coming up with a new theory that is overarching and can encompass both. What is interesting about the recent bridging approach to archeology, the studies I mentioned, Pulse and Moll and others, is that they seek to encompass both, albeit without a new theory per se. So have they just not got to grips with the fundamental theoretical tensions between formalism and relationalism, or is there something else going on? Perhaps to some degree, the theoretical tensions do need more work, but it may also be that archeologists have cottoned onto the key role of material culture in mediating between structure and culture or structure and agency or close-knit personal networks and more far-flung virtual ones. And it would seem they are much more alert to this than sociologists. It may be by accident rather than design for the identification of structure relies upon material culture when all we have are artifacts. We really don't have any choice. Anyway, what happens when we use material culture in this way and the above approaches are centered on material culture is that we implicitly recognize that material culture is simultaneously both form and content. Artifacts encapsulate both the categorical and contingent they capture structure and agency. An individual artifact is to some degree the result of an a priori social form while also being the outcome of a particular individual moment of production with all the accompanying contingencies. I might just briefly illustrate this with an image of some Aegean Bronze Age pottery. You can see here a typology of various jugs and there are a lot of different types of jugs from a site on Crete in the middle of Bronze Age. And if one looks at the drawing in the top left of a particular kind of jug it has a kind of a formal existence. At the same time you can see the different some different examples of this jug and one can see quite a lot of variation even while they all in a sense conform to those typological characteristics. So there is this sort of a priori form but also the embodiment of contingency and agency in each example. Material culture is in this way subtly communicative, a medium if you like with both form and content or as Ericsson might also put it both structure and culture. We can also see this combination as one between local and virtual because a typology or set of types is to some extent virtual or between micro and macro. So if archaeological network research is actively showing how our material culture is the bridge between close-knit networks and wider virtual networks then how can we flip this back onto our everyday experience? Widely differing scales do articulate and it is objects that play a key mediatory role. We are slowly learning that the initial optimism perfectly well networked even well bunkered was misplaced. Perhaps the problems that come with separation of scales felt acutely during this pandemic might be attributable to a disassociation from artifact space. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that companies are no longer so sure that their remote workers are performing tasks just as well online and it is processes of apprenticing junior staff especially that seem to suffer and this is what this slide is trying to convey. Perhaps it is that in such learning scenarios the importance of shared material culture in scaffolding interaction is particularly strong. Maybe it will dawn on us more and more that the virtual network can only work when tethered to the in-person and in ways that have a material culture continuum. The virtual may piggyback on the memory of the in-person for a while but it doesn't seem to be to me sustainable or resilient in the way that in-person networks are particularly when the associated materialities differ so much. I think back to the pivot to online teaching in mid-March my small graduate class was able to work pretty well I think online for the last three classes of the term but only because we had gone through the entire year prior to that in-person and in a shared classroom space where we leave many of our personal materialities behind though not all of them of course. Starting only virtually seems like an entirely different proposition when the materiality of Zoom, let's say if we can talk of its virtual materiality is anything but equitable. Perhaps it should have been obvious but the different scales of networks are not so easily separable they are interconnected and interdependent partly because of material culture. There are not two independent network scales macro and micro even if pandemic responses hoped or pretended that there were we have to nurture small scale face-to-face relations that are mediated by material culture for the virtual macro network to function and this is from GEL's Strothernograms paper which I think is just fascinating and I've written about it recently just showing how objects can mediate, exchange face-to-face and then how through that object that immediate relationship can be sort of converted into a much wider sort of cascading network. In a sense what I am getting at here is the way in which we move from private to public or from macro to macro and yes portable artefacts can play a role in this with their mobility but I also want to briefly feature here the role of fixed material culture or what we might also think of as the built environment another word for this is architecture and architectural theorists have thought quite deeply through the ways in which what is built which is after all material culture both emerges from and guides interaction these days with so much talk of bubbles I cannot help but think of the Sphere's Trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk the first volume of which is the aptly named Bubbles as you see here but I want to bring in another architect really and talk about Lydia Calipoliti she is the author of a 2018 book the architecture of closed worlds and a recent piece in efflux called zoom in, zoom out if we contain ourselves in built environments that are closed off as illustrated in this piece she uses in her book House for Cocos, a piece of nature then the transition from private to public is completely obviated we could I suppose live in a series of bubbles or bunkers like this a kind of modularity that either implies total disconnection if each bubble does its own thing or a thorough hierarchical control if each bubble repeats but what exists between each bubble is nothing there is no materiality just absence or as in this image just virus I suppose however in an open system as opposed to these closed worlds with flow between cells or between bubbles there has to be an architecture for such connectivity and thinking back to the ceramic typology slide I showed architecture too is simultaneously a priori social form on the one hand and contingency on the other both bubbles or bunkers and the spaces between them arise out of interaction and yet a structure and reminded of the work of another architect Lars Boybrook was differentiated between the more structured and modular forms of classical architecture and the more emergent processes of the Gothic and he calls this in fact a Gothic ontology interestingly some of the archaeological work I mentioned above that of geomian peoples on the one hand at Pueblo Bonito and of Matucarte at Chatlhueg is actually thinking about architectural spaces in conjunction with portable material culture and in the process navigating I think between formalism and relationalism in their approaches and I'd just like to finish by saying I think we can learn from our archaeological practice and its attention to the crucial role of material culture and the built environment as we try to find our way through our relationships near and far in this moment thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to trying to answer any questions or respond to any comments you may have thank you very much Carl for this inspiring lecture and yes you touched a lot of aspects not even much much wider than our own discipline yeah I think that we will get precious anyway your colleagues that we are hearing the lecture can ask questions through the chat box and this can be reported by me and so we will have the questions going on I would start with only one point that I think is can introduce somehow the debate well when you are speaking of formalism on one side and relationalism on the other and when you are showing the relation between the typology and the single part that can have variation and variability we are discussing something that maybe didn't enter so much the debate so far we have the model by Saussure the one that has something which is a rule which is the lung and the way that each expression come out the way that texts that people express themselves in this continuous variability of language so is this related also to the idea of relationalism and formalism that you brought by because I think at point of the theoretical debate is that the French discussion is somehow left often out of it but I think that we have also something to get from the model from Saussure of the language yes that's a really good point thank you Alessandro, I am reacting a little bit to some of the recent work that suggests that everything is really in a state of becoming which I largely agree with and that may make sense for certain kinds of material culture but somehow these assemblages in the Aegean in Bronze Age and later there does seem to be rather a strong sense of repetition and very recognisable forms that suggest to me that there is some sort of fixity of idea around a particular type so that it's replicated not just on one side but across many sites so this sense of the type in a way not just the sort of modern typology but a sense of like an emic type I guess as well may not have been very popular recently and I guess in later periods a sort of strong reaction against Beasley and those kinds of approaches but I guess it could be taken as a kind of argument for a grammar of sorts I'm thinking about it a little bit more like an ecology I guess but yes I guess one could push it towards grammar and then a sense of a generative long which then varies with parole that works against somewhat the sort of Persean model of stenotics that I generally prefer to work with but maybe there's room for looking at the tensions between those productively. Yes questions are not coming out so much so I would go further with something discussing it seems to be two people discussing but I hope that questions are coming anyway but in your deeper discussion of the situation of or wider discussion of our situation of the lockdowns and of the burn or the bubbles so you argue that materiality and its agency is something that is so much well integrated I don't want to use it here entangled because it is a little bit or even entangled with human experience that we cannot do without it but it is necessary for us as we are I mean I've been thinking particularly for a book that I recently published about containing and what that as a kind of logic or strategy does for human individuals or groups particularly just trying to think through different kinds of burial in terms of containing thinking about reliquaries a little bit not my specialty but in terms of containing houses and containment and there is a renewed interest in containing there are some interesting papers in a few different disciplines so then the pandemic dawned on me that oh there is a whole issue of containment here and of course it is a rather common word in relation to viruses there was a whole debate with the foot and mouth crisis in the UK about 20 years ago about what can one contain it is very hard to contain a virus so then we have to contain ourselves there is a materiality to that of course so I sort of had these ideas floating around and then I came across this quite interesting approach from this architect Lydia Caliboliti so I just felt kind of inclined to include that tonight because it seemed a way of thinking about material culture across scales and what containment does at a particular scale I guess and excluding other broader scales of interaction sorry it's a rather rambling response and I still go on so we go on debating more or less but the last point that I wanted to ask you is about the scale of fast and slow that may remind us also long-duray and contingency or event something like this which was in this case phrased on three levels which were the long-duray, the contingency and the event but on the other side also the scales that we apply often are micro, meso and macro or something like that in a three-part height way but while you spoke more of a dualism but I think that you were not satisfied of this dualism at all, you thought that there was much more continuity between scales no, isn't it? Yes, I mean I've tried to I mean while recognizing that differentiating these scales is a somewhat artificial process and recognizing a whole series of scales obviously reducing that to micro and macro is way too simple but I just wanted to sort of slightly polemically get the point across that if one has a very micro scale of very close networks and I guess the macro scale of these virtual networks in a way maybe it's the meso scale that's fallen away this sort of community level urban level interaction if one can put it like that so yes, I mean I really should try to think through some of these issues, not that I understand contemporary society well enough but through some of these issues with a more subtle scale or approach I think, yeah for sure the question in the end came out and I think you can see in the chat that is in practical terms do you think that there is anything as too many categories it was she was Juan Avaldez Tollet making this question in practical terms do you think that there is anything like too many categories yes I suppose the manager of a supermarket might say there can be too many categories there are what 40,000 different products in a supermarket but I think if we're thinking about archaeological processes of categorization then it's an abstractive process I suppose the idea is to reduce the complexity that's out there so for those categories to be useful to us I suppose they should be limited to some degree but then one gets into the question of to what extent our modern categories map well on to whatever ancient categories they may have existed maybe I'm not getting the gist of the question there but I'm happy to try again maybe Juan Avaldez Tollet wants to get a little bit refine the question a little bit if it is necessary that is too many categories where because you are obviously speaking of the classical also discussion emic ethic is the fit between our categories and the past categories I think Carl now but I don't think that these too many categories was about this argument but at the same time I found very very clear the example that you made with the typology because it is again something that at the end we all archaeologists have at some time went through and so this is absolutely clear for us so when you know that categories maybe are too many and you think that they should be less you think something like an Occam's razor that we should apply to our and cut away what is much just to get to it to a core of significant categories this is what you mean anybody who has done ceramic photography will know that there are lumpers and splitters also with evolution we have lumpers and splitters you can just go back and forth between those I see questions are in stage yes but is any other question coming out because I didn't want to this is one of the two that which came back when you are describing an artifact regarding its physical attributes you may define categories for it which you will then study through this but would too much description bias our aim oh ok so right so some of this work that I have been describing like geomion and peoples for example they do a lot of processing if you like categorization processing before doing the network analysis right so they are actually comparing classes so they will have classes like turquoise and shell beads and whatever in the same way the mills at our work came up with like 25 different ceramic wares that were then coded from site to site to be able to do that kind of categorization work to make things function in the network analysis so of course there are choices there and kind of a reduction so I presume they chose what they chose according to the questions they had in mind there is because there are endless physical attributes of even assured right that one could endlessly describe but you don't want to do that there was the question by Eric Krone which is about the remarks on types which is connected maybe with the formal one can I ask the speaker to reflect a little more on typology and how it will hold up with the renewed interests for structures and materials for example ecology and object oriented approaches how typology is coping with this different view of the record maybe so I don't know yeah I think just off the top of my head I think there has to be a sort of a back and forth between a real relational perspective and then a more kind of objects and a perspective if you like so that one might categorize a particular kind of pot let's say in a certain way but then when one looks at its associations one might alter a sort of assemblage approach look at its relations one might adjust one's thinking about what that category really consists of just one example thinking of a session earlier today about miniaturization and miniatures you obviously pay attention to the specific category of the miniature and document its characteristics but then it's in a necessary relationship well it's probably in a relationship with another kind of object of which it is a reduced scale version I mean it may not be but it often is it's what miniature implies usually so then you you're already thinking relationally with that kind of category of objects yeah I guess that's what I'd say to that and then there are two questions which are related which are about the scale problem the first is by which is to what extent is the scale of small words to make them larger and closer to the macro or shrink them to be closer to the micro and the other question by Sigma Bafford is how do you distinguish between macro and macro and micro when does micro become macro so they are connected how is the relation and the progress between micro and micro and vice versa yeah I mean I'm just made to think of a really excellent work by Tom Tataron on the Mycenaean world in the Aegean late Bronze Age and he talks about local coastscapes I mean sort of thinking geographically but also organizationally I guess he talks about co-scapes his next scale up is something like small worlds I think a collection of sort of local co-scapes and then up to inter-regional but you know so he's devised that with his particular sort of circumstances in mind my student defended has tried to sort of use that for Crete and you might think it's the same part of the world but it doesn't quite work in quite the same way so yeah I'm not sure it's possible to sort of say you know the micro scale if one's thinking in those sorts of special terms should be this and the mesoscale should be this I mean it also is also thinking about the transport technology that's available so it's immediately cultural and infrastructural as well right so it would matter if your boat technology or your road technology would shrink or expand the scale of interaction so I think you know there's already a sort of rather complex of like geography and technology even just at that initial level of discussion so I think that to sort of try to answer Berserk's point I think that's a way in which you know scales might might be shrunk or expanded according to kind of available infrastructures in broad terms and do you think that they have also a connection with the individual experience that is some smaller scale is connected more to the individual agency and the practice and the risk micro scale that goes beyond the or beyond as becomes as such a complex sum of individual agencies that requires a jumping size? Certainly in terms of what Tateron was doing with I mean it's really quite focused on maritime interaction and he was really trying to think about the experience of the local co-scape and who might be using those co-scapes and what kinds of infrastructure they'd be using and then thinking that any like inter-regional interaction would require would have a whole different set of experiences probably with maybe specialized merchants and sailors rather different. I mean still with an experiential aspect to it so not entirely virtual because of the particular infrastructures in play and then there is a question by Robert Staniok which is going back to the idea of everything being in the making. Our established networks affected how we have been dealing with the changing COVID circumstances for example in teaching or jobs how do you think current networks will undergo change due to the lockdown and do you think it will provide us with analogies for changing past interactions? Yeah I don't know I mean I think one thing that's really I'm not sure if this is really going to address it except obliquely one thing that struck me in discussions with colleagues in the university about using zoom let's say or whatever platform is that it does bring up all kinds of issues around equity of different students having different access to resources and different positionality in respect to public spaces or semi-public spaces within the home and so certainly my university or my department recommended not asking students that should not be asked to have their cameras on if they don't want to. So that sort of intrusion into private space or throwing light on the materiality of private public space I think is quite interesting in ways I hadn't really anticipated and so that's I sort of hinted at that with the sort of virtual materiality of zoom but I haven't really thought about that enough and I'm not specialized in that. And yeah how will networks get very sick of this and will clamor for in-person interaction and again I mentioned teaching, apprenticeship, learning one might not think of the structure of a boring classroom is particularly important but perhaps we'll learn that it is not to mention practical classes labs this kind of thing. So as for analogies for changing past interactions I mean I was really coming at this from the other way around in terms of actually the way that we think archaeologically about past interactions and this recognition of the necessary recognition of the structure and role of materials can maybe help us think through that and recognize how important architecture built environment all these things are for us today but I don't know how over time we'll rethink how we think about past interactions through this. Well I don't know maybe this is so much information related our communication now it is so abstract somehow that it may help maybe to think about situations of limited communication but I don't think that there is a direct connection because it is so different what is happening now but I think that we can think of something like small flows of information very directional coming from one point to another and then experience which is going on in a partitioned way this can have some reflection maybe but I don't know but there is another question by that goes back to the aspect we treated formally that is thinking relationally makes me appreciate how arbitrary certain archaeological categories are such as populations groups types but these are still useful when we make comparisons perhaps we need both yes yeah I think so maybe not a very satisfactory answer just to say yes yes we need both but I mean I'm just reminded of a sort of something I wrote in a volume edited by Tim Ingalls where his perspective of everything is in constant flow and there is movement and there is becoming which is very valid of course and there are maybe temporary knots or eddies where things stabilise temporarily that's great but I do think that when I look at ancient artifacts I feel that there is something a bit stronger than just a temporary eddy in the stream and there is a sort of stability in various artifact categories or forms of architecture or whatever and there is a reason for that that kind of stability has a kind of cognitive function if you like so I think maintaining an awareness and this might not sound like a methodological path but maintaining an awareness of that tension, the dynamic between changeability and stability so yeah thanks for that question Helen well this makes me think also that maybe we what we lack a little bit you spoke formally about the fact that types are strong entities sometimes and very well defined but maybe we lost a little bit the reflection about what is the definition of type and how it is changing in an information world because in an information world maybe it is a little bit different I don't know but there is another question by Maria Mina that is connected with the one we had already that is have you considered how networks between archaeologists today may be shaping the way we interpreted the past I think this is obviously about the historiographical point of the research where we are we are network and so we look for networks or how we look for networks I haven't maybe as much as I might have done but it does strike me when one looks at different sorts of you know just thinking about network approaches over the past several decades how yeah there is something about the structure of institutions about academia which has allowed some approaches to become more prevalent at a certain moment as opposed to others I mean there was very interesting work in a sort of French tradition from Jean-Claude Gardin I think you know looking at some of these sorts of structural tendencies and developing network thinking of sorts but it just didn't really get anywhere it's kind of an interesting case there were approaches in the 80s and 90s as well so there is definitely a particular institutional systemic bias in how we get into the particular points we're at in network thinking or whatever else but I mean there's papers by Brugmans and people on sort of analyzing bibliography and looking a bit more at that if you're interested great well I think that we don't have more questions but if people are still willing to raise some questions I think else we are closing so nothing is coming anymore but I think that we touched some of the aspects of your keynote not only in the archeological point of view but also in the trend that we have in the future what is happening to all of us that's really being great and sorry has bridged between them this is our comments about us but I think that this has been really interesting and promising for the development of ideas out of the technicalities of social network analysis because I think the social network analysis has been really strong and great in bringing some facts in focus with somehow technical point of view but we still have to think a lot about what is behind this social network analysis what is the ontology of the things that we are comparing and connecting and what are our thoughts about the interpretation maybe you can end with something about this if you want Yes, it's something I tried to address in that paper you mentioned at the beginning in the leave donlan edited volume just trying to think a little bit about micro networks of interaction and how if one thinks using different ontologies that even the very notion of interaction is problematic and if one starts thinking about interaction or processes of connection where something of one individual is left in the object or is carried over into the other individual then one really needs to sort of work out some of the basic assumptions and wonder if network analysis is even compatible with that so I tried to say something on those lines in that paper but I hope that there is more connection between some of the really interesting work I think in network archaeology and in some of the approaches that we are seeing around materiality, ontology, etc Ok, there is an observation by Biserca Gajdarska again about the point that ideas from scholars from small countries are taken less seriously than from big countries and this was a point raised by Józef Neustupni but I don't think that this requires a precise answer but it is connected obviously with the idea of how network archaeology or archaeologists are shaped by the discipline itself I think that network analysis took development also in many different countries not only in the mainstream British archaeology or Anglo-Saxon tradition Yeah, it seems to be, I definitely take the point that there is particular structural systemic issues around language, who gets published, how do you get published all these kinds of things but it does seem fairly well distributed I haven't really analysed that but there are approaches network approaches coming out of all kinds of traditions I think Ok, great so if there are no other questions I would ask if we step out or what we do what do you think Carl? Sure, thank you very much Alessandro I enjoyed that, thank you for your help It was great Carl, thank you very much and thank you everybody, almost 300 people which attended the lecture Thank you very much to everybody