This well organized and highly readable book on the detection of social networks and regional identity on the basis of archaeological sources is interesting for a broader audience than scholars interested in the Italian Bronze Age alone. In this sense, its title is slightly misleading. While it suggests that the aim of the book is to reveal social networks and regional identity in Bronze Age Italy (which it does), their identification in reality serves — and quite surprisingly — a historical goal: namely, to formulate hypotheses on the formation of the ancient peoples of ancient Italy prior to the Roman conquest (ch. 1). However, one can also read the book as a sophisticated exercise in social network analysis using an important but difficult dataset. At the heart of the book is the issue of identity and ethnicity of Italy's Iron Age populations. Indeed the reader, right from the beginning, is invited to think along with the author to evaluate her idea that it might well be that Late Bronze Age regional social exchange networks were the precursors of the Veneti, Etruscans and Latins in north and central Italy, the Oenotrians and Messapians in the south, and other historically known peoples that we know to have been living scattered across peninsular Italy in the pre-Roman period.

This is a very challenging hypothesis, and the author puts it to the test using formal computerized network analysis. Let us start with a brief look at the central premises and methodology of the book, such as can be distilled from ch. 3. Departing from the concept of path dependence, which postulates that a trajectory once set in (in this case during the Late Bronze Age) will influence future developments (even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant), the author hypothesizes that Bronze Age networks in Italy may have been at the basis of the geographical disposition of Italy's ancient peoples and identity formation. By mapping Late Bronze Age networks onto the historical regional/ethnic territories, as postulated by classical scholarship for pre-conquest Italy, the author expects to reveal a path dependent continuity. Where this does not occur, this requires explanation in terms of specific causes for the perceived discontinuity.

Such patterning can be formally analysed, as Blake does, using computerized social network analysis (SNA). In ch. 2, B. discusses the categories of objects that she adopts in her network analysis: forty object types for the Recent Bronze Age (RBA) and twenty-six for the Final Bronze Age (FBA), all extensively studied and published by specialists. Applying SNA, in ch. 4 the first step in the analysis is to construct networks on the basis of the findspots of the chosen classes of objects for the RBA and FBA respectively. In carrying out the peninsular-wide analysis, B. works with a reduced matrix of findspots from which she removes hoards, ritual deposits and casual or unknown find contexts. This she does in order to reveal the impact of long-distance activities on regions, rather than to analyse regional activities between nodes in the networks, which is her second step in the analysis. In her initial peninsula-wide analysis, sites with shared objects must therefore not be further than 50 km apart from each other to qualify as being connected (a two-day walk or manageable day's sail) (89). The analyses reveal that during the RBA the Po-Apennine subgroup (correlating with the famous Palafitte/Terramare culture) stands out as a major northern regional network, with a much smaller but distinct subgroup in Lombardy correlating with the very distinct Canegrate culture. In the south, on the Adriatic coast, a network based on shared Aegean type ceramics shows up in modern-day Apulia and Basilicata.

In chs 5–8, B. then proceeds to analyse the individual networks resulting from the peninsular-wide analysis, and subsequently deals with the northern networks, those of west-central Italy, those in the Marche, Umbria and adjacent Apennines, and finally the one in south Italy. B. now includes all findspots with reliably dated evidence in her analyses while relaxing the distance parameter in order to establish intensity of exchange and thus to trace regional cohesion. For each of the peninsular networks, B.'s analyses result in interesting observations on the scale, integrity and intensity of the Bronze Age networks, the way the networks map (or do not) onto known Bronze Age cultures as conventionally defined in protohistoric archaeology, on interaction between networks where such interaction was not noted before, on continuity and discontinuity between the RBA and FBA and between the FBA and Early Iron Age, on the vulnerability of those networks dependent on a few central nodes only, on the dependence of networks on certain types of objects and so forth. These observations are interesting: at times agreeing with existing ideas, at times challenging them, but in nearly all cases inviting further research, testing and debate.

While B.'s network analyses appear highly instructive, informative, analytical and stimulating, her goal to understand the formation of the peoples of Italy on the basis of Late Bronze Age regional groups is in its current form, as I see it, difficult to attain. One cannot escape the feeling that the advanced Iron Age and Archaic periods are left orphaned between the book's interest in the archaeological detection of Bronze Age networks on the one hand and the wish to see whether they map onto the literary construct of Italy's ancient peoples on the other. As a heuristic tool B.'s SNA approach is, however, successful as it questions why we (think we) see continuity in some areas and not in others. However, the lack of comparable formal analyses for the Iron Age and Archaic periods (which would be a veritable Herculean task, far beyond the scope of a single book and single researcher) results in much — admittedly, highly informed — speculation. In this sense, the book is an attractive and welcome invitation for researchers, aided and inspired by B.'s approach, to extend the regional analyses into the early Iron Age and beyond for specific cases.