Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies

Preface

xv Preface From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Large-scale industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce , to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. . . . [Capitalist market expansion] has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades. Karl Marx and friedriCh engels, The CommunisT manifesTo (1959 [1848]:15–16) As Marx and Engels were astutely aware, the expansion and consolidation of market systems coupled with the disintegration of long-standing trade barriers is the fundamental defining process of global history over the past 500 years. As they noted, the PrefaCe xvi last several centuries of market development have been a central impetus for advances in technology, global population movement and growth, as well as polity development , interaction, and conflict. Yet, as we now know 160 years later, Marx and Engels saw only the tip of the iceberg. They accurately predicted but never witnessed the full extent of market globalization and multinational corporations. One need not be a card-carrying Wallersteinian to agree that few individuals (if any), no matter how remote or removed from the mass of market centers dotting the earth, live outside the purview of the modern global market system. Marx and Engels started their historical narrative in the European Middle Ages, but the market exchange has a longer history distinct from the origins of capitalism . But how far back? Do we start the account in Ancient Greece and Rome or the Middle East, as some scholars have suggested (see discussion in Morris and Manning 2005a:131–132)? Is market development deeper-seated and more geographically widespread than the Mediterranean and Eurasian world? Is market exchange an innate component of human behavior, as Adam Smith and others believed? Or is it far more variable? If so, can we gain a better perspective about the nature and history of the modern market system by comparing market developments in other, non-Western societies? As explained in Chapter 1, we believe we can. Given the weight and importance of these questions and their implications, we would expect that archaeologists would have made great strides in the investigation of early market exchange as a central focus of their research, as they have for other seminal processes in human history, such as the transition to modern humans or the origins of farming. An outsider would assume that archaeologists had long since developed a sophisticated toolkit for studying market exchange and amassed an impressive corpus of interpretations about premodern market development, especially in times and places that predate written records. This has not been the case, however. Much of the problem stems from the difficult task archaeologists face in finding unequivocal evidence for market development and exchange, as several contributors to this volume point out. In the archaeological record, market exchange can look like many other things. How do we distinguish movements of goods resulting from market exchange from movements related to gift giving, government handouts, or other forms of interpersonal or institutional exchange? A strong methodological focus on detecting market exchange in archaeology is one element of this book. Few volumes have tackled archaeological approaches to market exchange, save for Richard Hodges (1988), who focused on applications of central-place theory and derivative models to archaeological data. In the 1970s and 1980s influential volumes in archaeology addressed modes of exchange and distributional models but without a specific focus on market institutions. Markets and marketing were the subjects of a book edited by Stuart Plattner (1985, ed.) a quarter century ago that contains two contributions by archaeologists but mainly...