Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies

11: Finding the Mark in the Marketplace: The Organization, Development, and Archaeological Identification of Market Systems

227 The emergence of the marketplace as a primary location for economic interaction was one of the great institutions and developments of the ancient world. As an institution , the marketplace increased the number, rapidity, and efficiency of householdand institutional-level economic exchanges. It provided elites with a source of prestige through marketplace sponsorship and a means to mobilize and convert surpluses into a variety of alternative products as needs required (Garraty, Chapter 1). The marketplace also fostered craft production and helped support both full- and part-time craft specialists. Finally, marketplaces were a means through which large urban populations were provisioned and cities developed (Stanish, Chapter 9). Market exchange and marketplaces are fundamental social and economic institutions that have been largely overlooked in the study of emerging cultural complexity. Marketplaces are correlated developmentally with societies that have high population densities and evolving sociopolitical complexity. They developed independently inawiderangeofsocietiesandoccurinadiversityofforms.Whymarketexchangeand the development of market systems have not drawn greater attention from scholars studying the ancient world is itself an enigma. Part of the reason may be the ubiquity of market exchange in ancient society and the tendency of investigators to view it as a dependent aspect of elite behavior or urban development rather than an institution in its own right, with separate origins and organizational features. Marketplaces fostered new forms of commercial and social interaction that were not possible in non-market economies because marketplaces encourage a greater range of economic interactions Kenneth G. Hirth Chapter Eleven Finding the Mark in the Marketplace: The Organization, Development, and Archaeological Identification of Market Systems KenneTh G. hirTh 228 at lower costs than are possible under non-market conditions. In economic terms, the appearance of marketplaces represents an evolutionary development equivalent to, and as revolutionary as, the origin of the state. How and why early market systems developed should be the focus of specific problem-oriented research. The fact that they are not is the unfortunate result of viewing the evolution of economic institutions as secondary and embedded features of the societies in which they occur. This volume is an important step in bringing the importance of the marketplace and market exchange to the attention of archaeologists who work with societies in which market interaction occurred. It deals with four separate questions: (1) how markets and market exchange articulate with other exchange mechanisms in broader economies, (2) how to identify market exchange archaeologically, (3) how market and non-market institutions articulated within premodern societies, and (4) how premodern markets developed over time. These are important questions that have not been dealt with in the growing, recent literature on non-Western political economy (D’Altroy et al. 2001; Masson and Freidel 2002; Morley 2007; Scarborough and Clark 2007; M. E. Smith 2004). The case studies presented here not only provide examples of how market exchange was organized in societies of different sizes but also supply examples of how archaeological analyses can investigate market exchange and its corollary institutions. My discussion will not examine the individual contributions in this volume because Christopher Garraty and Barbara Stark and Garraty do a fine job of summarizing their goals and content in Chapters 1 and 2. Instead, I identify important issues that either have not been discussed or need to be the focus of future research. My aim is to encourage the development of new theoretical and conceptual tools for the study of ancient and premodern markets. Finding the Mark in the Marketplace One of the fundamental problems in economic anthropology is finding the common ground to separate and discuss economic and sociopolitical institutions in a meaningful way. This is the essence of the modernist-primitivist debate, the formal and substantive views of economy, and the bottom-up and top-down views of market development that Garraty discusses (Chapter 1). This dilemma has always been a problem because of the methodological shortcuts anthropologists employ. We must remember that economic anthropology began with ethnographers attempting to fit formal economic methods to the traditional societies they were interested in studying (Adams 1963, Armstrong 1924; Herskovits 1940; Malinowski 1922; Thurnwald 1932, 1934). The fit was not very good, and the substantivist response was strong and quick in coming (Dalton 1969; Finley 1999 [1973]; Polanyi 1944, 1957b; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson, eds. 1957). The flaw was their failure to develop an independent and appropriate methodology for studying non-Western and ancient economies (cf. Mauss 1954; Sahlins 1972). This is an ongoing problem that still needs resolution (see later [18.117.148.105] Project...