Aegean Interactions: Delos and its Networks in the Third Century by Christy Constantakopoulou (review)

Informed especially by Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), recent research on networks has produced useful results especially for the study of prehistory and for particular kinds of archaeological data sets. The astonishingly rich archaeological and epigraphic evidence generated during Delos’ period of independence (c. 314 to 166 BCE) would seem to offer a brilliant opportunity to apply network analysis in the hope of answering a range of questions related to the city’s development in the century preceding its transformation as a free port. Constantakopoulou employs an awkward and sometimes ungrammatical English prose, but competent copy-editing could have fixed many of the infelicities of style; and there is really no excuse for the number of obvious errors, a pattern signaled on the first page by the very first footnote, which is duplicated and misplaced (it should be deleted and the identical n. 3 on the following page retained).