Wine trade from Roman Crete: Onomastic─geographic network analysis
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 14/08/2016

We present a case study developed within the EPNet Project (ERC-2013-ADG 340828), whose main goal is to characterize the dynamics of the commercial trade system during the Roman Empire.
We analyse a subset of archaeological data found in Pompeii, namely, the Greek epigraphy (tituli picti) on the Cretan amphorae. It represents a promising dataset, given that Greek names can be crossed with the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) and linked to geographical data. Since we deal with two different kinds of entities, names and places, we represent the relations between them through a weighted bipartite network. The bipartite network is built considering that the epigraphic data is incomplete and ambiguous, and foremost, that there are a few onomastic aspects to be taken into account. On the one hand, there are some very common names (homonimy) that don’t provide significant information. On the other, there exist highly similar names that are likely to belong to the same families. Therefore, we introduce a set of probabilistic rules to weigh the links of our network that, together with the reference of the whole LGPN, allow us to:
Include the ambiguity of the data with very few assumptions.
Identify homonimy cases and remove its effect.
Check for family names grouping.
With the aim of detecting relevant trade-related information, we extract the community structure of the bipartite system. It is an appropriate baseline to detect different types of nodes according to their function in the network [1]. The goal is to identify possible roles for the names and places as a function of two topological variables in two-mode networks [2], by means of a functional cartography of families and places of different types (ports, production and consumption places, etc.).

Ignacio Morer, José Remesal, Albert Diaz-Guilera, Luce Prignano, Daniel Martin Arroyo

[References]
[1] Guimerà & Nunes Amaral (2005)
[2] Saavedra et al (2009)