It’s finally there: the last two months of my PhD. Ever since I started almost four years ago everyone I talked to with a Dr. in front of their name told me the same thing, that the last few months are the hardest. It sounded as if when you finally decided to finish the damn thing off it starts putting up a fight. This usually finishes in the valiant PhD student winning the battle but loosing part of their sanity and most of their short-term memory in the process. My short-term memory is long gone (this is the main reasons why I claim to show promise for a career as an absentminded academic), but I have held on to my sanity. So far.
As I am working my way through my PhD in the coming two months I will document my struggle and loss of sanity on this blog, hoping it will end in victory. You can expect blog posts about all of the case studies I worked on in the last few years. In particular citation networks and visibility networks. But I will also share some of the conclusions I drew from working with network methods as an archaeologists, the challenges archaeologists are faced with, how we could confront these challenges, and my efforts to make a small contribution towards this. So stay tuned, and above all, please don’t hesitate to comment and provide me with your feedback on my work. I can use it now more than ever! 🙂
Archaeological Networks 
Well, I think your works are fantastic!!! I read you states of the art in networks and archaeology and they helped me A LOT in the last days when I was writing a project. Acutally, me and my team want to contact you because we applied for some funding to do a very nice and interesting project where we are going to use network theory and agent-based modeling to study three prehispanic societies that we hypothetize were heterarchical. Besides the archaeological evidence that suggests that they were not hierarchical or completely egualitarian, from a complex networks point of view they distribution of their settlements (so fat, very hypothetically) points to having obeyed local decision-making, self-organized processes and preferential attachment as the mechanism that grew their housing. So, anyway, I have been working on complexity for a few years but I am new to archaeology so: yes, your papers brought a clear light on what´s the state of network theory in archaeology right now. We´ll definitely contact you in a few months. Best of luck with your PhD!!!
Thanks, that’s so nice to hear 🙂 especially since I am submitting the phd in just four days!
Sounds like a great project and I will gladly discuss it and any questions you might have. So do get in touch with me when the time is there
Oh my cosmos!! That´s fantastic!!! I sent the message thinking that you had to submit it in two months still, not four days!, but if this is the case: MY BEST WISHES!!! 😀 Also, I will contact you via email in a few days (not months) once I know that you are not in the rush you must be right now. 🙂 Ps: after reading your papers, I´m completely sure you´ll do great!! Hugs!