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131 As should be clear from the previous chapter, throughout most of the period covered in this book, trade, interspersed with episodes of violence, was the principal form of interaction between indigenous peoples of the region and Etruscans and Greeks. But even after the Roman military intrusion into the region in the late second century BCE, trade continued to be a major element of colonial relations and a significant factor in the history of the colonial situation. Hence, a consideration of the nature of trade and traders is a crucial aspect of the attempt to understand the interests and practices that entangled the parties to these exchanges in new relations. BARTER Cross-cultural trade in Mediterranean France remained for centuries almost entirely in the form of barter. Coinage, although employed for various purposes within Greek settlements, was little used in indigenous contexts until the first century BCE, and there were few low value coins in circulation before that period that could have served the needs of small-scale exchanges. Nor is there evidence of other forms of special purpose money (such as standardized metal bars or ingots, shells, etc.). Some objects could have come to serve as commonly accepted abstract standards of value invoked in negotiating exchanges. Given their ubiquity and their standardized size, amphorae of wine are a likely candidate. But it is unlikely that these actually functioned frequently 5 TRADE AND TRADERS 132 • T R A D E A N D T R A D E R S as a medium of exchange for other goods or an intermediary store of value in conducting transactions between merchants and local consumers. For one thing, they flowed in one direction only: Greek merchants would have had little interest in receiving back amphorae of wine in exchange for other goods they were peddling. So wine would not have served the same range of functions as coins or general purpose money. In brief, exchanges would have relied on traders and consumers finding some way of negotiating to reconcile their competing systems of value and to agree over the relative valuation of particular items that were to change hands in particular contexts. The initial attempts at such exchanges were undoubtedly subject to a wide variety of misunderstandings (such as gift vs. commodity expectations), inadvertent breaches of etiquette, and conflict. But increasing habituation to such interactions would have resulted in the working out of systems of communication (perhaps with the development of pidgin or trade languages) and cultural interpretation that would smooth the process. The presence of resident traders at some indigenous settlements serving as cultural brokers would greatly aid this process, not least through the formation of social relationships that could anchor networks of exchange, stabilize flows of goods, and enable the extension of credit. Individual exchanges would always have involved negotiations over the relative value of the specific items involved, but these would increasingly be carried out within the framework of mutually accepted sets of practices and understandings of value and commensurability.1 Merchant ventures in the ancient Mediterranean were full of risks from weather, pirates, and uncertainty about supply and demand conditions because of slow information flows. As Neville Morley noted, several strategies were used to counteract these risks. One was to carry very mixed cargoes in the hope that something in the ship would always be saleable in one location or another. Alternatively, one could “cultivate a regular route, building up knowledge of the preferences of customers, perhaps establishing relationships with those customers and perhaps specializing in particular goods which would always find a market.”2 It appears that Etruscan and Massalian merchants (or, rather, those peddling Etruscan and Massalian goods) turned fairly quickly toward the second strategy. The cargoes of most ships during the first few centuries of the encounter focused quickly on wine and a limited range of drinking ceramics. They usually had “mixed” cargoes, but only in the sense that the wine and ceramics were from a variety of origins. Functionally, this was an extremely narrowly targeted range of goods, and this pattern is reflected on consumption sites. Once objects traversed cultural frontiers at the various liminal points of exchange along the coast, they would, of course, have been reinserted into local systems of value and networks of exchange (for example, within indigenous societies or within the Massalian world) and redeployed with different meanings in consumption practices that both were structured by local cultural conceptions and structured local social and political relations. Objects that could not be...

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