Frontiers in Economic History

Stefanos Gimatzidis
Reinhard Jung Editors

The Critique
of Archaeological
Economy
Frontiers in Economic History

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Stefanos Gimatzidis · Reinhard Jung
Editors

The Critique
of Archaeological Economy
Editors
Stefanos Gimatzidis Reinhard Jung
Austrian Archaeological Institute Austrian Archaeological Institute
Vienna, Austria Vienna, Austria

ISSN 2662-9771 ISSN 2662-978X (electronic)

Frontiers in Economic History
ISBN 978-3-030-72538-9 ISBN 978-3-030-72539-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6

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Contents

1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy . . . . . . . 1

Reinhard Jung and Stefanos Gimatzidis
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Randall H. McGuire
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value: Thinking
from the Study of Ancestral Central America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Rosemary A. Joyce
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s
Contribution Revisited, 60 Years Later . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Svend Hansen
5 Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Bleda S. Düring
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy
of an Únětice Ruler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Roberto Risch, Harald Meller, Selina Delgado-Raack,
and Torsten Schunke
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land in Pharaonic Egypt
Beyond Redistributive and Neoliberal Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Juan Carlos Moreno García
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange
in the Mediterranean (3rd to 2nd Millennium BCE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Reinhard Jung
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient
Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Stefanos Gimatzidis

v
vi Contents

10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm

and the Debate About the Ancient Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Jan Paul Crielaard
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE):
Exploring Social Tension in a Path Dependency Model . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Mark L. Lawall
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic
and Classical Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Robin Osborne
Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Critique
of Archaeological Economy

Reinhard Jung and Stefanos Gimatzidis

Abstract This book studies past economics from anthropological, archaeolog-

ical, historical and sociological perspectives. By analyzing archeological and other
evidence, it examines economic behavior and institutions in ancient societies.
Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it critically discusses dominant economic
models that have influenced the study of past economic relations in various disci-
plines, while at the same time highlighting alternative theoretical trajectories. In
this regard, the book’s goal is not only to test theoretical models under scrutiny,
but also to present evidence against the rationalization of past economic behavior
according to the rules of modern markets. The contributing authors cover various
topics, such as concepts of commodity and value, trade in the classical Greek world,
and management of economic affluence.

This book presents a collection of papers by scholars of different disciplines and

theoretical orientations, who discuss recent developments in the reconstruction of
past economies through anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives.
The starting point for this critical discussion was a turn in archaeological theory and
interpretive practice during recent decades towards economic models regulated by
individual agency. A single and isolated individual driven by their economic agency
has emerged in modernity in an imaginary free market and accordingly defined
archaeological theory and interpretative praxis. Social anthropological research has
been showing since the nineteenth century that such “Robinsonades” lack founda-
tions in pre-capitalist societies. Instead, they represent projections of contemporary
economic role models into the remotest past. Furthermore, certain current perceptions
of the singular individual and eternal market forces are more or less unconsciously
inspired by the hegemonic neoliberal economic discourse of our time.

R. Jung (B) · S. Gimatzidis

Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: Reinhard.Jung@oeaw.ac.at
S. Gimatzidis
e-mail: stefanos.gimatzidis@oeaw.ac.at

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_1
2 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

Archaeological studies of past economic systems require a critical study of

historical and archaeological data through an anthropologically informed theoretical
approach and testing of the results in the field. The quality of a model is evalu-
ated against its ability to explain a specific historical situation, the residue of which
is archaeological evidence in context. The evidence, in turn, offers the tools for
testing—rejecting or adjusting—the model.
Archaeological theory in the western world often seems to have overwhelmingly
favoured a neoliberal positivism in the interpretation of past economic relations. In the
first half of the twentieth century, cultural historical approaches projected modern
economic models into the past through a rather formalist perspective; processual
archaeology attempted to quantify these relations; finally, post-processual critique
emphasized the role of the individual in shaping ancient economic patterns. Archae-
ological theorizing is a reflection of advances in sociology and philosophy but also of
socio-political transformations making, therefore, interpretation of the past vulner-
able to manipulation, especially when economic relations are at stake. Economics
of the past have been studied through several different theoretical approaches not
only in accordance with the respective socio-political background of the observer,
but also depending on the Zeitgeist. There are only a few academic fields, where
interpretation depends so heavily on ideology and the theoretical methods engaged,
as economic studies of the past.
We therefore understand that the discussion regarding past and modern economic
relations will never be exhausted because it is both historically and socially contin-
gent. This book appears in the midst of a series of crises that have shaken the foun-
dations of the world economy and, consequently, the historical conceptualization
of modern economic models. The main question that inevitably arises concerns the
current role of archaeology after its emergence in the modern period as a colo-
nialist and nationalist device, or an expression of the noble spirit of upper class
humanists, and the subsequent—often-disoriented—critique in the postmodern era.
If archaeology has a social role today, this is portrayed by personal and collective
visions and anticipations that are embedded in social experience. Denouncing archae-
ology’s embeddedness in social matters (cf. Papadopoulos & Urton, 2012: 20) does
not serve any alleged objectification in the reconstruction of economic and social
relations, but rather obscures the motives of the historiographer or observer. Archae-
ology and anthropology may present a tool kit for explaining the domination of
certain economic models over others, the class, gender or ideological determinants
in the definition of modes of production and thus assume an active social role—
every time through a different historical and social perspective. In this sense, the
present volume is inevitably different in the conceptualization and reconstruction of
past economic relations from earlier works treating the same topic. Furthermore, it
presents a conscious effort to raise awareness about social needs and expectations,
also in fields dedicated to the study of the past.
A constant challenge in archaeological interpretation is that of becoming aware
of several points of critique and reasserting them in analytical praxis. One of such
points that is selectively treated in this introduction is the notion of commodity, which
has undergone several re-definitions since its introduction from a production-oriented
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 3

perspective in the nineteenth century. Another critical issue is the social conditioning
of property in past economies, which have been historically shaped through contin-
uous transformations. Relations among cultural phenomena can reflect, and more
often, conceal or fetishize the economic behaviour of social groups with distinct
interests that historically defined and transformed concepts such as commodity and
property. Human agency is socio-historically embedded, which means that indi-
viduals can become active social performers, yet under the restriction of certain
conditions. These conditions may emerge independently of human will, but they are
always subject to transformation by means of conscious human (re)action.

The Conceptualization of Commodity in the Exploration

of Past Economies

The definition of commodity has been a central issue in Marxist discourse and formed
the basis of the critique of political economy. It was Georg Wilhelm Hegel who
suggested that a product becomes a commodity in private exchange and implied its
use- and exchange-value that was subsequently elaborated by Karl Marx (Hegel,
2019; Marx, 1962 [1867]: 49–98; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
1867-c1/ch01.htm). The latter developed further the labour theory of value in accor-
dance with Adam Smith’s definition of labour as “the real measure of the exchange-
able value of all commodities” (Smith, 1976 [1776]: 47). Marx explained the gener-
ation of “surplus value” by means of “unpaid” labour as a result of the commodity
character of labour power itself, which was of crucial importance in his definition of
accumulation of capital (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 331–340). This implies the production
of commodities above subsidence needs and as such it found application in economic
studies, often deprived of its political connotations.
The commodity has usually been perceived according to the Marxian defini-
tion as a notion deriving from and applying to modern capitalist markets. Marx,
however, held that the commodity was also a phenomenon of “an earlier date in
history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as nowadays
(Marx, 1962 [1867]: 97)”. What makes the difference in this ambiguous definition
of the role of commodities are apparently the modes of production that significantly
differed in modern and pre-modern societies. The Marxian approach to the dual char-
acter of the commodity, as characterized by use and exchange value, presupposed a
ruling class that appropriates the surplus product generated by others. Commodity
exchange was a mechanism to achieve this. Such economic systems, characterized
by marked inequality, could not have been accommodated outside hierarchically
organized societies.
The exploration that began a long time ago of the modes of exchange, with a
focus on gift and barter, was a substantial contribution of anthropology to the under-
standing of pre-modern economic transactions. Social-cultural anthropologists from
the 1980s onwards attempted to overcome complications in the conceptualization of
4 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

commodity by depriving this notion of its production properties and defining it merely
as a product of exchange and consumption (Appadurai, 1986; Miller, 1995). These
developments in anthropological theory had some impact on archaeological thought
(Mullins, 2011). Consumption was soon established as a conceptual framework in
the Mediterranean and elsewhere, where anthropologists and archaeologists focused
on the use value of commodities and downplayed not only modes of production but
also the economy of exchange (Dietler, 2005, 2010). All this started, according to
Graeber (2001: 26, 30), when post-structuralism urged the “shatter[ing of] totalities”,
took individual agents as constructs of the fields they were playing on, and finally
“opened up another space into which the maximalizing individual could crawl”. At
the same time “contemporary neo-conservative forces have rewarded postmodernism
(and its post-processual archaeological manifestation of archaeology) because of its
relativism and nihilism”, according to Bruce Trigger quoted by Randall McGuire
(2006: 70).
That the value of commodities derives from labour tends to be forgotten or
obscured, according to Karl Marx, when the products are detached from their place
of origin and circulate in the market. This is at the core of his concept of “commodity
fetish” (Marx, 2009 [1866]: 59–61). Karl Polanyi (1944, 1957) argued that market
behaviour was mainly a modern state phenomenon and that we can barely talk about
an “economy” as a rationally governed and organized institution in past societies.
Polanyi’s famous economy was embedded in and ruled by social institutions whose
choices were not always rational.
A common question asked not only by economic historians such as Polanyi but
also by anthropologists concerns the conditions under which a market economy
appeared for the first time. According to Polanyi governed market economies are
recent constructs of modernity. In the past, social institutions posed restrictions of
several kinds on economic exchanges, and defined economic behaviour not only in the
despotic oriental states during the Bronze Age but also in the Greek and Roman world.
Moses Finley (1973), who followed the conceptual footsteps of Polanyi, acknowl-
edged the performance of private transactions in the Near East, Greece and Rome, but
still regarded the dominant economic models in antiquity as socially embedded and
static, at least until the later phases of ancient Greek history. According to the Anglo-
American ancient historian, these were mainly agricultural economies with limited
surplus production and restricted transactions. Nevertheless, these economic systems
allegedly experienced transformations such as the introduction of gift exchange in the
Homeric period, which may have prepared the ground for a new commodity-centred
economy in the Mediterranean.
Already prior to Polanyi and Finley, the French sociologist Marcel Mauss had
begun analysing modes of exchange and obligation that defined social and economic
relations in “pre-modern” societies, from the Indian and Pacific oceans to the Amer-
ican Northwest. After commenting on several reciprocal mechanisms and the spiritual
connotations of giving, accepting and repaying gifts, and after analysing their role
in the emergence and maintenance of social ties and the definition of structures and
rights, he turned his attention to early historical societies. The aim of that compara-
tive study in his most influential essay Le don (The Gift) was to explore “a stage of
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 5

social evolution” since “institutions of this type are a step in the development of our
own economic forms, and serve as a historical explanation of features of our own
society” (Mauss, 1966 [1925]: 46). After discussing a number of case studies of the
Roman period, Mauss (1966 [1925]: 52) came to the conclusion that “it was precisely
the Romans and Greeks, who possibly following the Northern and Western Semites,
drew the distinction between personal rights and real rights, separated purchases from
gifts and exchanges…passed beyond the excessively hazardous, costly and elaborate
gift economy, which was…incompatible with the development of the market, trade
and production, and, in a word, uneconomic”. This was what Pierre Bourdieu (1977
[1972]: 172) called a transition from a “good-faith” to an “undisguised self-interest
economy”.

Property and Social Relations of Power

The exchange of commodities presupposes a state of ownership. The free labourer,

for instance, owns his labour power and sells it to the owner of the means of
production (e.g. a factory) for a defined time span, during which he then works
for that factory owner. The goods produced during that time span are the prop-
erty of the factory owner. These property relations in capitalist production are quite
clear-cut (even if fetishized), while defining property in many pre-capitalist societies
poses considerable problems. Especially in archaeology this is a most challenging
endeavour because property is a juridical category. Archaeologists seek support from
and cooperation with other disciplines for unravelling the historical dimension of
property.
Although in this volume we are not dealing with the Palaeolithic period, it is
important to note at the outset that the human claim to property is a historical and not a
natural phenomenon (see especially McGuire, in the present volume). For the greatest
period of human existence, the survival of the small and vulnerable groups (extended
families), who lived by hunting and gathering their food, depended on sharing what
they appropriated from nature. Hunter-gatherers of the modern age entertain food
sharing alliances spanning vast territories, which provides security in times of need.
Failing to share resources would endanger the group, so generosity is valued, while
greed is discouraged and ridiculed. While clothing, tools and weapons, and ornaments
are personal possessions, sanctions are imposed on those who try to accumulate even
such personal possessions (Woodburn, 1982; Flannery & Marcus, 2012: 23–39).
Anthropological studies focusing on isolated hunter-gatherer communities revealed
these common characteristics of social behaviour, the ultimate purpose of which is the
elimination of status and inequality. They have thus disproven the infamous economic
“Robinsonades”—hypotheses speculating about primordial individual claims to land
and resources and their treatment as commodities (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 90 n. 29).
Marshall Sahlins famously spoke of the original affluent society, characterized by
limited needs but also by a quite limited amount of time dedicated to work for survival
(Sahlins, 1972 [2017]: 1–37).
6 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

Agrarian societies turned the rules of free access to natural resources upside
down by limiting that access to specific groups of people through the definition of
property that was then defined by laws (unwritten or written), fortified by coercion
and enshrined by ideology (Flannery & Marcus, 2012; cf. Hansen in the present
volume). Like the general concept of property, so its various forms appear as historical
inventions created by specific societies according to their economic needs and social
relations.
Besides the personal belongings mentioned above, property concepts came to
be applied to the means of production (implements/tools and land, the latter being
the most important means of production in pre-industrial societies), to consumables
and dwellings. The question arises, if and to what extent the producers owned their
products and which groups of people became excluded from ownership. Moreover, in
many past societies and even up to the present day, property rights may also include
the working people themselves, degrading them to the status of slaves (Zeuske, 2013)
or semi-free people of various kinds (Luraghi & Alcock, 2003).
Since its emergence, the state guaranteed the endurance of an established mode
of production characterized by opposing classes, which was possible most impor-
tantly due to the power (and regularly the monopoly) of its political institutions to
enforce coercion. However, as the appropriation of surplus in the hands of a domi-
nant minority causes social tension and ultimately conflict, state authorities early
on tried to present themselves as a balancing factor attenuating the consequences of
such uneven distribution of property and power. “I did not deliver the orphan up to
the rich man; I did not deliver the widow up to the mighty man; I did not deliver the
man of [only] one shekel up to the man of one mina… I installed justice in the land,”
said king Ur-Nammu in the oldest known law code at the end of the 3rd millennium
BCE (Neumann, 1989: 101).
Although even simple tools were not necessarily the property of craftspeople, but
might have been made available by state administrations for specific tasks, especially
in public works (Palaima, 2015: 629–633), the ways in which land was classified
as property form a basic criterion for the differentiation among various economic
systems. Land could be collective or private property and access to it may have
been restricted depending on gender or age. Furthermore, property of land (and its
size) was bound to membership in a political collective, e.g. in Archaic and Clas-
sical Athens and Sparta (Finley, 1973: 48, 95; Demandt, 1995: 143–144, 200–203).
Plots might be fenced, even named as specific property, one of the earliest cases for
the latter practice being the labels of agricultural domains controlled by the ruler
buried in the Naqada IIIA2 tomb U-j at Abydos around 3200 BCE (Dreyer, 1998).
Products may also have been marked and inscribed with names or symbols indi-
cating their producers, while the material properties of the containers and closing
devices such as sealings may confer information on the location of the estate (e.g.
Bavay, 2015). Marks, inscriptions and the like would then enable an assessment of the
juridical status of plots via archaeological finds. Usually, however, the prospects of
direct archaeological verification of property rights on land are rather limited. Other
economic regimes may consist of landholding without proper ownership. In those
cases, the right of cultivation and cropping may have been coupled with obligations
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 7

to corvée or payment of rents. The archaeological differentiation between landown-

ership and other types of tenure may prove a difficult or impossible task without
written sources (and sometimes even with those written sources, cf. Moreno García
in the present volume). The possibility to inherit land, to mortgage and especially to
sell it would indicate true private property.
Another way to elucidate property regimes in a past society is to investigate the
evidence of storage facilities, their distribution, capacities and especially accessi-
bility as well as their contents (thus including archaeobotanic and archaeozoological
research). In terms of capacity, one may ask if products stored in a house can be
classified as evidence for subsistence production (Chayanov, 1966) or as surplus.
Household archaeology seeks to identify a residence group with shared tasks in
production or, in short, an economic entity. Such a household does not necessarily
coincide with a single house structure nor with a kinship group (Johnston & Gonlin,
1998) that may have formed a political unit and determined inheritance of property
according to the social norms of a given society. Testing hypotheses about lineage
and kinship groups using only archaeological means is impossible, but archaeometric
investigations based on aDNA can, in certain cases, provide hard evidence on kinship
relations—provided a sufficiently large section of the community received a formal
inhumation burial and that the soil conditions favour the preservation of aDNA (e.g.
Alt et al., 2014).
Of critical relevance for the economic classification of a society is the question
which social groups can appropriate (agricultural) surplus. The way surplus is stored
can provide important information in that regard. Is it centrally stored or in a dispersed
way; is access to storage facilities restricted (spatially or by closing devices, perhaps
including sealing practices); are there administrative control mechanisms for the
regulation of delivery and withdrawal and how did those work? To answer such
questions—or better, to draw reliable conclusions, representative areas of settlements
need to be investigated through excavation, while survey as well as excavation data
should provide evidence about possible settlement hierarchies.
Property regulations are the juridical expression of the existing relations of produc-
tion. However, different kinds of property, such as collective and private, landholding
and landownership, latifundia tilled by slaves and smallholdings worked by free
peasants, etc. coexisted in many past societies. This leads to further questions. Is it
possible to determine if one type of relations of production was dominant? Are the
coexisting relations of production the result of preceding socio-economic experiences
with enduring implications, or does one type replace the other?
A growing interest in the coexistence of different relations of production has
certainly provoked in-depth research in recent years. Following, for instance, the
reconstruction of the modes of production in Mesopotamia and the Bronze Age
eastern Mediterranean after the substantivist/formalist debate and the conceptualiza-
tion of a binary model (palatial vs. non-palatial) centred on the ruler (royal property)
and the villages (communal and private property), respectively (Zaccagnini, 1981;
Halstead, 1992; Buccellati, 1996), more recent approaches stress the more complex
and at the same time denser entanglement that different relations of production had
8 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

with each other in those societies (McGeough, 2007: 350–361; Shelmerdine, 2013;
Nakassis, 2013).
Humans produce property through labour in the framework of their social relations
under given historical conditions. They distribute the products of their work and
consume them, and they can exchange part of the surplus product against others.
Products transferred in trade amphorae could be marked in various ways in order
to express the role of producers, land owners or political authorities. Such marks
may have reflected relations of power of all agents participating in production and
exchange (Lawall, in the present volume).
As a result of the socially uneven distribution of goods in most societies, property
can also be appropriated by force by means of theft, piracy or war including enslave-
ment of captives, a practice possibly used as a threat by rulers in order to appropriate
labour (Bernbeck, 2019). In trade, property can be accumulated by cheating and
overreaching. In addition, someone’s property can be seized by others as an effect
of the failure to repay a debt, which in many ancient societies could include the
possibility that the debtor became the property of someone else—the well-known
phenomenon of debt slavery (Zurbach, 2017).
Property laws regulate the appropriation of nature by humans in specific social
relationships. There is admittedly a general historical tendency of private property to
extend its sphere at the expense of other forms of property (Hudson, 1996)—which
at least during the last 500 years happens on a global scale. In the most recent stage
of capitalist production, private property laws (patents, intellectual property rights)
become increasingly applied to immaterial products and to natural living organisms,
their genetic codes and the knowledge about those organisms preserved by oral
history—even when they are not genetically engineered products and have been used
by humans for hundreds of years (e.g. Pearson, 2013; Sezneva & Chauvin, 2014).
Such practice of course serves to preserve and secure their commodity character,
but legal and other enforcement strategies such as terminator genes in genetically
manipulated seeds lead to increasing costs for preventing that these commodities
will be (self-)reproduced at the expense of the extraction of surplus value. At the
same time, agricultural surplus is destroyed at a large scale in certain countries
of the European Union to prevent unwanted market fluctuations and imbalances.
These recent developments show at the same time the historical limits of private
property and the commodity form itself. “Today, the very swelling of juridical and
technological measures developed to stabilize content and limit the satisfaction of
needs, their rising economic cost and the surging amount of collective social energy
they require to waste, may thus similarly speak for the impending obsolescence of
the commodity form: not so much its actual social decline as the increasingly blatant
historical inadequacy of its forcibly prolonged maintenance” (Sezneva & Chauvin,
2014: 150).
In general, the historical tendency of enforcing private property laws and regula-
tions globally onto nature was of course never a linear and continuous process, nor
was there any lack of resistance against it by those who were becoming expropriated
either from their collective property or from free access to resources.
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 9

Finally, in many societies, we are witnessing a growing awareness of how property

regimes, and the way modern capitalist economies appropriate nature to the benefit
of a tiny minority, have the effect of ruining the resources of the vast majority—in
the last consequence the living conditions of all of humanity (WMO, 2020). This
makes it not only an interesting task, but a necessary one to investigate the historical
genesis and development of all forms of property and the ways they shaped human
life.

Contributions to the Critique of Archaeological Economy

The papers in this book undertake a critical discussion of dominant theoretical

models that have been applied to the study of past economic relations during the last
two centuries, and consider alternative theoretical trajectories. These are conceived
against the background of recent developments in the capitalist world system such as
the current enduring crisis. They are further tested on the grounds of well-documented
archaeological and historical contexts. Economic behaviour is conceptualized as the
diachronically changing relations of production, distribution and consumption. The
intention is not always to test the theoretical models under scrutiny, but rather to
present evidence against the rationalization of past economic behaviour according
to the rules of modern markets.
The History of Archaeological Thought was illustrated in the seminal study of
Bruce Trigger (2006) for the most part as a reflection of Modernity. As such it has
always been subject to its historical and cultural context and apt to embrace theoretical
advances in other disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, economics and science.
Some of the most influential theories that shaped archaeological thought throughout
the twentieth century and continue to do so derive from Marxism. Randall H. McGuire
comments in his paper on the various perceptions and applications of Marxism in
the understanding of social and economic structuring, and argues that a Relational
Dialectical Marxism still provides an apt theoretical framework for the analysis of
past social relations. McGuire has previously discussed in a critical manner post-
modernist theories and approaches that found their way into archaeology. In this
paper, he does more than that. The confrontation with the “new shiny theory” of New-
Materialism that is appropriated by the Symmetrical Archaeology current presents an
opportunity to elucidate the Hegelian concept of Relational Dialectic. Recent critique
from a New-Materialist perspective against “Marxist archaeology” is unsustainable
because it downplays and oversimplifies the variability of Marxist approaches to
the exploration of the past. The glorification of the Thing and its agency by New-
Materialism and the perception of humans, animals and things as equal agents in
an imagined flat ontology by Symmetrical Archaeology are critiqued for having
misconceived the substance of historical disciplines—that is to understand processes
of social change. This task is instead achieved through a Relational Dialectic, an
effective tool for the exploration of interactions between human and non-human
10 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

actors. Last but not least, McGuire addresses the role of archaeology in the current
world as a social discipline, an issue that is rarely treated by historical disciplines.
“The economy” of past societies used earlier to be perceived as a male domain,
where female agency found a place usually in the form of either slave or domestic
labour. Women were accordingly reduced to commodified labouring bodies in the
reconstruction of the modes of production and exchange. The socio-economic roles
ascribed to women were those of wives, concubines and most usually child bearers.
Disciplines with a historical record, such as classical archaeology, attributed to
women distinctive social roles such as princesses or priestesses that were, however,
always dependent on some male-constructed hierarchy. Rosemary Joyce shows that
similar trends persist in recent and modern studies, and argues that a requirement for
any analysis of past economic relations is the prior definition of what is really “eco-
nomic”. She undertakes this endeavour through the examination of her case studies
in ancient Mexico and Central America, with the aim of elucidating concealed forms
of female economic agency. The labour of women is usually treated as “house-
hold” activities and by this means alienated from “real” economy. By exploring
the modes of production of cloth and cacao, which were used as value standards
for tribute payments so that their exchange consequently defined social hierarchies,
Joyce highlights a special role of females in the economic relations of their societies.
Although these goods were produced by women in the so-called “household” sphere,
their economic implications had major effects on the structuring of their societies.
Nevertheless, certain finds indicate that these goods were not produced in common
domestic but special elite contexts. A key point in understanding the use value of
cloth and cacao is their embeddedness in social relations that reserved a special social
status for women.
Polanyi’s school certainly has had a lasting impact on the anthropological and
historical disciplines, as Svend Hansen demonstrates in his contribution. He is
inspired by a re-reading of “The economy has no surplus” by Harry W. Pearson,
a close collaborator of Karl Polanyi and editor of his works. Hansen engages with
the debate regarding the interpretation of surplus production and its emergence in
human societies. The scholars investigating the “zen way” of “affluent” (Sahlins)
hunter-gatherer societies stressed the advantages of less work expenditure, more
leisure time coupled with a generally low living standard and a presumably lower
percentage of hunger in the earth’s population compared to today. However, it is clear
that industrial civilization will not be discarded—as Polanyi had aptly formulated in
1947. In the tradition of enlightenment, Marx and later Polanyi and the substantivists
emphasized the social embeddedness of economy and the evolutionary consequences
a surplus product has had for human history. Pearson’s point in 1957 was to insist
that the amount of surplus is always relative to the needs of a specific society, i.e.
not determined by biological needs. Therefore, there can be no absolute surplus as
economic liberalism would have it. However, his critique stressed the evolutionary
viewpoint on surplus, its enhancement and growth, while Marxist scholars insisted
that surplus itself was not the problem, but instead the struggle over its distribu-
tion. Against this background, Hansen evaluates the results of recent research on the
Neolithic period, stressing instances of inequality and vertical control mechanisms in
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 11

societies evolving in the northern Fertile Crescent, as well as in south-eastern Europe,

relatively early in the respective paths of Neolithic economy. He concludes that the
concept of “affluent society” does not hold for many of these developments. Referring
to Pearson’s point that surplus does not simply emerge, but results from decision-
making in society, Hansen at the end invites us to search for that first moment of that
(political) decision to organize surplus production among the egalitarian societies.
Investigating possible concepts of value that existed in past societies that were
still largely egalitarian is a difficult task and therefore rarely embarked upon. Bleda
S. Düring looks into production and exchange of Chalcolithic societies by applying a
“regime of value” approach sensu Appadurai. He focuses on stone figurine production
in Asia Minor during the middle of the 5th millennium BCE (Kilia figurines) and
on Cyprus in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE (cruciform figurines)—
unrelated to each other, but exhibiting some common traits, which he explores. As
such regimes of value are culturally specific, he investigates the stone statuettes in
terms of technological and stylistic characteristics that are common in all the regions
in which they appear, in order to identify what made them desirable and valuable to
their users. In the case of Kilia figurines, the marble they were made of was not an
exotic raw material, but attention should be paid to both the stylistic standardization
and the craftsmanship, because the round, protruding heads in particular must have
been difficult to make. The Cypriot figurines made of pikrolite from the Troodos
Mountains also exhibit a marked stylistic standardization. Again, the material was
common, but the challenge consisted in shaping the figurines. Here, it proved difficult
to cut the cruciform shape from a kind of stone that only occurs in a small amount, in
veins penetrating a different rock ground. In both cases, Düring argues, the figurines
had evolved from earlier stone-working traditions, and were part of a widespread craft
tradition. In addition, they were highly stylized and thus related to iconic images; they
therefore potentially functioned as indicators of membership in a certain collective.
He does not try to pinpoint a specific value or meaning, but reflects that these figurines
could have served in the negotiation of identities and, through their exchange, stand
at the beginning of subsequent developments of exchange networks.
Given the lack of written sources, the earliest stages of the emergence of states
can be apprehended only with great difficulty, when the study’s focus is placed
on political institutions and jurisdiction. Another approach, namely the investiga-
tion of the economic structures underlying the formation of political institutions,
may be more promising. The group from Barcelona (Roberto Risch and Selina
Delgado-Raack) and Halle (Harald Meller and Torsten Schunke) investigates the
economy of the earliest case of a stratified society characterized by marked social
inequality in central Europe, the so-called Circum-Harz group of the Central German
Únětice Culture (Early Bronze Age, c. 2200–1600 BCE). In earlier papers, Meller
has proposed the interpretation of that society as a state maintaining a permanent
army (with a hierarchical significance of different weapon types) and other dependent
specialists not employed in agriculture. In this contribution, for the first time, a group
of scholars investigates the economic basis of that society. They refer to the more than
70 macrolithic tools used as fill material in the construction of the Bornhöck burial
mound, which is the largest Early Bronze Age mound in Central Europe and dates to
12 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

the second half of the nineteenth century BCE. Most importantly, the grinding slabs
from the innermost stone core convey important information about economy, as they
clearly differ in size and utility from the (smaller) grinding stones of contemporary
longhouses, the typical settlement dwellings of the Únětice Culture. Due to their size,
those grinding slabs should have been used by pairs of cooperating hard-working
persons, were intended for a higher productive capacity than the grinders from the
settlements, and were unrelated to the domestic sphere. From the concentration of
these specialized grinding slabs in the mound, the authors draw conclusions regarding
the person buried there. They infer a centralized organization of an important part of
the agricultural production and a control of that agricultural surplus product by the
ruling social group. Regarding the question as to who would have needed those food
supplies, they propose an army serving the ruler buried underneath the Bornhöck.
Pharaonic Egypt provides scholars with a totally different kaleidoscope of source
material—both archaeological and textual, which is of course partly due to the very
favourable preservation conditions offered by the desert climate. Nevertheless, the
reconstruction of an encompassing picture of Egyptian economy and society in the
three millennia BCE continues to provoke lively debates. Juan Carlos Moreno García
challenges the classic description of Pharaonic economy as purely centralized and
redistributive in the Polanyian sense. While acknowledging recent critiques of neo-
institutionalism, he finds usefulness in these approaches especially for investigating
the role that private property of land, markets and rational economic behaviour had
throughout Egyptian history. He focuses on those actors who, according to inscrip-
tions and papyri, did display individual initiative motivated by economic gain, espe-
cially wealthy landholders, who constituted a tiny minority of Pharaonic society
since the Old Kingdom of the 3rd millennium BCE. Often the sources do not allow
the determination whether these were private landowners, rather than holders of land
that belonged to a particular institution (such as a temple). While the pursuit of indi-
vidual economic interest was hampered by the social environment of family, fellow
citizens and patronage networks, Moreno García is able to show how kings could
favour them to counter opposing interests of powerful families. Crisis situations—
such as the end of the monarchy in the late 3rd millennium—also offered occasions
for privatization seized by wealthy individuals, who exploited the poverty and indebt-
edness of other social groups. However, the diachronic evaluation of the manifold
(yet imbalanced with regard to certain sectors of the economy) written sources lead
him to the conclusion that individualist economic strategies were mostly carried out
inside the institutions of the Pharaonic state such as temples, crown lands and royal
grants of fields. They had little impact outside of these, and thus neither destabilized
those institutions nor led to the establishment of a sizable real estate market.
In recent years, the societies of the Mediterranean Bronze Age, with their wide
array of archaeological evidence complemented by limited written sources, have
stimulated a growing number of scholars to turn to modernist approaches to their
economies. As a response, Reinhard Jung chose to investigate goods exchange and
trade in the Mediterranean Bronze Age with a classical Marxist approach; he applies
the commodity criteria as defined by Marx to different kinds of products exchanged
from the 3rd to the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. A commodity is a useful thing
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 13

produced in order to be exchanged against other commodities on the basis of their

exchange values. While the commodity character of products is characteristic of capi-
talist production, typically also including labour power (as a commodity), commodity
production did exist in many pre-capitalist societies, as Marx had already noted. As
exchange relations become more regular and take on a greater (quantative) impor-
tance, the quantities of products that are exchanged will increasingly come to depend
on production factors. Their exchange value, as defined by the necessary production
time (on average in society), will then become important and distinct from their value
in consumption (use value). As this development typically appears first in exchange
relations between societies, the examples discussed by Jung refer to metal export
from Cyprus and Mycenaean pottery export from Greece among others. Written
sources of different Mesopotamian and eastern Mediterranean societies reveal that
the respective temple and palace bureaucracies were well aware of the socially neces-
sary labour time that went into the production of goods, including the subsistence
goods necessary for maintaining the work force (and thus determining the value
of labour). However, the fixation of a general, socially accepted value equivalent,
typically expressed in quantities of precious metals, occurred only in the societies of
Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Egypt and the Levant, but not in Mycenaean Greece nor in
Bronze Age Italy. The exchange relationships between different Mediterranean soci-
eties involved products which fulfil the criteria of commodities to various degrees,
while the process of commodification seems to have started earlier in the east and
progressed towards the west. Under specific circumstances, these exchange relations
led to a rapid acceleration of socio-economic transformations in certain societies
(uneven and combined development).
The emergence of the formal market has been a focal topic in studies of past
economic relations. Earlier discussions about the social conditions that favoured its
appearance were conducted in the framework of the dichotomy between formalists
and substantivists that was introduced by Karl Polanyi in his opus magnum The Great
Transformation. This dualistic opposition—between views perceiving economic
relations either through the perspective of an allegedly inherent economic maxi-
mization principle and rational economic thinking or as “embedded” in social institu-
tions—was rejected by David Graeber (2001) and other anthropologists. Commodity
is a term that commonly appears in the anthropological and archaeological debate
about modes of exchange. This notion was used by Karl Marx to describe objects
produced to be sold in a market. Commodities were thus predominantly thought
to represent a feature of market economy, in contrast to earlier gift economies (to
the latter usually belong all forms of exchange that do not aim at economic maxi-
mization). Anthropological analyses of the modes of exchange or the process of
“commodification” in the past demonstrate, nevertheless, that (the same) objects can
at the same time be exchanged either as gifts or commodities depending on their
circulation between different social spheres. This view is exemplified in Stefanos
Gimatzidis’ paper through the examination of the exchange of bronze tripods, a
historically and archaeologically documented cultural phenomenon in Homeric and
Classical Greece. A major archaeological manifestation of this practice is the massive
deposition of tripods in Greek sanctuaries. This was previously understood as a ritual
14 R. Jung and S. Gimatzidis

practice or as a material expression of social antagonisms through the dedication of

precious artefacts by peers. Gimatzidis instead recognises major economic implica-
tions in this practice, whose primary and main outcome was wealth accumulation.
It is argued that tripods were exchanged not only as gifts but also as commodities
through a ritual system of wealth redistribution.
Connectedness is an issue commonly treated in archaeological and historical disci-
plines. The notion of connectivity and its economic implications attracted particular
attention in Mediterranean archaeology after the publication of Peregrine Horden
and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea. In his paper, Jan Paul Crielaard demon-
strates how the new conceptualization of this notion challenges earlier models that
understood past economic and social relations through a fragmentation or a centre-
periphery perspective. Crielaard focuses on the examination of the agents who formed
the connecting tissue of the exchange network in the maritime landscape of the
Mediterranean that has been usually understood as an entity. He stresses the role of
cabotage in economic interrelations and explores the input of small traders in the free
movement of goods. The major objective of this paper is to show that connectivity is
not an all-applicable norm that a priori characterizes all cultural entities through time,
and in fact several social, political and cultural restrictions existed. The same micro-
regions experienced different forms of connectivity through time, which accordingly
defined their social and economic relations. In other words, there may have been
several different economic models shaping variable social behaviours and creating
unequal social relations during the same period in different regions. The region of
Karystia in the southern part of the island of Euboea is examined as a case study
exemplifying the variable forms of economic development and interconnectedness
in its Aegean setting through time.
Transport jars of specific types that were produced for exchange of agricultural
goods in the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and, over the course of time, in many
other regions all over the Mediterranean became the hallmark of maritime economic
transactions through a standardization process in their modes of production and
exchange. The study of Aegean transport amphoras, which from a certain point of
time onwards were furnished with stamps, has become a distinct discipline known
as amphorology. Mark Lawall, who has extensively explored several economic and
social aspects of this topic, presents a new approach in his paper through the notion
of Path Dependency and its conceptualisation by the new institutional economist
Douglass North. This relates to the power of experience and previous practices that
shape “paths” of economic behaviour. Lawall’s endeavour is, nonetheless, not to
demonstrate the consistency of allegedly pre-determined economic structures but to
explore social tensions in the inconsistencies of established patterns. A definition
of the modes of technology transfer is a requirement in understanding the spatial
organization of pottery production. Shifting consistencies and inconsistences in the
amphora types and their geography, as well as their stamped impressions bearing
personal names and symbols, are taken as evidence indicating the state’s—successful
or unsuccessful—participation in their production and exchange. The purpose was
to ease tensions among the social agents involved in these economic transactions,
who were elite landowners, city-assigned fabricants and workers.
1 An Introduction to the Critique of Archaeological Economy 15

The exchange of archaic and classical Attic pottery overseas has been a focal
topic in the studies of the ancient economy. This is due to its high representation
in almost every context in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, its variable types
and figurative decoration, the relevant textual evidence and finally its alleged artistic
quality. Attic pottery has been treated several times in the past by Robin Osborne, who
in his contribution to this book takes a holistic approach to its production, exchange
and consumption and presents in an almost narrative way variable aspects of its
trade pattern overseas. Osborne’s starting point is that Greek pots were certainly not
carried as ship ballast, as has been previously claimed. He argues instead that their
use and exchange value, and consequently circulation, were regulated, among other
factors, also by distributors. The supplying system of certain cultural contexts with
certain Attic pottery types is examined in juxtaposition to the formation of temporal
patterns in this pottery’s distribution. A thought-provoking reconstruction of the scale
of production is argued by means of the reproduction of the same decorative scenes
with minor variabilities, which are ascribed to individual artistic agency. Osborne
concludes that trends in Attic ceramic shape and decoration types were defined by
painters’ tastes and were primarily shaped in the Athenian society they were part of.
Additionally, Attic potters obtained a worldview through middlemen, a reciprocal
relation that further affected the selection of types and decoration. It was therefore this
kind of cultural interaction between producers and consumers, but also the agency
of image which was at least partly driven by merchants, that shaped the patterns of
Attic pottery exchange overseas. All these factors defined a special trend of pottery
consumption outside the Aegean that can be compared to the appropriation of other
aspects of Greek culture.
The idea for this book goes back to a symposium which we organized at the
Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna from the 13 to 15 June 2018 with the title
“The Critique of Archaeological Economy”. We wish to express our gratitude to
the Academy for financially supporting this symposium and the Viennese academic
and non-academic public that attended it for its feedback. We also thank Annalisa
Rumolo for manifold help during this event and Lia Ludwikowski for her efforts in
the preparation of this volume.

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Chapter 2
Writing the Deep History of Human
Economy

Randall H. McGuire

Abstract In archaeology, a New Materialism has developed. Archaeological

promoters of this theory reject Marxism out of hand. These archaeologists equate
the relational dialectic with oppositional thinking and declare Marxism as dead. A
refutation of the New Materialism’s critique of the dialectic leaves open the question
of why archaeologists should embrace Marxism, which is a theory of Capitalism,
to archaeologically study the deep history of human economy? My simple answer
is twofold: (1) if we wish to transform capitalism we must demonstrate that people
created Capitalism in the past and that people can therefore transform it for the future,
and (2) Marxism offers archaeologists an intellectual tool kit to study the ancient past.

Archaeologists have always recognized that we live in a world that entails never-
ending and diverse interactions between people and things. Most commonly
archaeologists have used things to try and understand people. Lately, bright new
theories/philosophies have enticed many Anglophone archaeologists to embrace
forms of Neo-Materialism that take the material seriously, often more seriously than
the human. These philosophies advocate for thing power (Bennett, 2010), Object
Oriented Ontology (Morton, 2017: 12), Assemblage Theory (DeLanda, 2016),
and Thing Theory (Brown, 2003). To clear space for the Neo-Materialism these
philosophers reject the timeworn Marxist Historical Materialism. They declare Marx
ist tot. Within archaeology we see this Neo-Materialism most adamantly expressed
in the Symmetrical Archaeology.
I will focus on archaeological applications of Neo-Materialism most especially
those under the heading of the Symmetrical Archaeology. I will argue that archaeolo-
gists who dismiss Marxism provide a weak alternative in Neo-Materialism. This alter-
native maintains the status quo of Capitalism, limits our ability to critique Capitalism,
and weakens our capacity to proffer alternative to it. Their dismissal of Marxism
springs from a profound misreading that oversimplifies the various interpretations

R. H. McGuire (B)
Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA
e-mail: rmcguire@binghamton.edu

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 19

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_2
20 R. H. McGuire

of Marx and that more importantly misrepresent the relational or Hegelian dialectic
that underlies most Marxist theory in U.S. archaeology. A Relational or Hegelian
Marxism provides a profound way to write the deep history of human economy.
Before getting to the meat of things, I want to position myself and my ideas. First,
I am an archaeologist not a philosopher. I will be engaging with philosophy, but
my goal is to comment on archaeology and not the philosophers that archaeologists
interpret. Second, my own philosophical understandings derive principally from left-
wing Anglophone thinkers such as Bertell Ollman (2003), Angela Davis (2015), Roy
Bhaskar (2013), David Harvey (2019), bell hooks (2000), Terry Eagleton (2016),
Vine Deloria Jr. (1997) Heidi Hartman (1981), and Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
(2017). Third, I will of course, speak of French and German philosophers (including
Karl Marx) but I have only read them in translation. Fourth, I am an U.S. archaeologist
who works in Latin America. I participate in Hispanic theoretical archaeology. What
I present here is very much an American perspective, American in the broadest
sense of all the Americas. Finally, I have published two books that provide much
more in-depth presentations of my reading of Marx and my praxis of applying it in
archaeology (McGuire, 1992, 2008).

Relational Marxism

Marxism originated with the ideas of Karl Marx and has matured, developed, and
grown for more than 100 years. Like other grand theories of humankind and society
it has come to include a great variety of different viewpoints, drawn understandings
from other theories, and inspired persons outside of the tradition. Also, like other
grand theories, people have bent and hammered it into an instrument for pernicious
purposes.

Interpretations of Marx

Marxism starts with the ideas of Marx. Marx pondered the fundamental issues of
social life in order to formulate a critical theory of Capitalism. He did this in tentative,
dynamic, and often paradoxical ways. Marxism ultimately relies on a radical concept
of history. For Marx, history fashioned the stage for social action but people created
history. The creation of history involves culture, identity, and interpretation and thus
affords the opportunity for people to come to a critical awareness of their own social
actions that leads to Praxis. Marxists take an anti-reductionist holistic approach to
the study of humanity’s history. They reject the idea that scholars should divide
real life to parts (culture, economy, politics, society, or history) and that they should
particularize different theories to explain these parts. The logic of the dialectic directs
us to research society as an interconnected whole.
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 21

Marx did not leave us Marxism. The term was unknown during his lifetime. Over
more than a century, Western Marxists have developed, differentiated, and diversified
their scholarship. They did not create a single, unified, doctrinaire, theory of society
that advocates can simply hitch to our empirical cart or that critics can simply dismiss
in a few pithy sentences. Instead Western Marxists have created a tradition of thought,
a philosophy, a mode of theoretical creation that has and will generate many theories.
Scholars have developed Marxist archaeologies in many parts of the world
including the former Soviet Union, Europe, China, Latin America, North America,
and Japan. Many communist states transformed Marxism, including archaeology,
into little more than an ideology to legitimate the exercise of political power. Ideology
lacks the tension between knowledge, critique, and action. Without this tension,
Marxism became totalitarian party communism and a source of alienation, domina-
tion, exploitation, and oppression that used archaeology to justify the state (Klejn,
1991: 70; 1993; Trigger, 1995: 326). Western archaeologists rejected party commu-
nism. Many adopted a traditional or classical Marxism that uses Engels’ (1927)
dialectics of nature. These include scholars such as V. Gordon Childe (1956, 1989),
Bruce Trigger (1995, 2003), Antonio Gilman (1998), Thomas Patterson (2003), and
the Hispanic Arqueología Social (Lumbreras, 1974; Vargas & Sanoja, 1999; Lull
et al., 1990; Lull & Micó, 2011; Bate, 1998; Tantaleán, 2016). Others developed a
critical archaeology that draws on French Structural Marxism, the Frankfurt School,
and Gramci (Leone, 2005; Shackel, 2000). In North America, many researchers,
including myself, embraced a Hegelian or Relational Marxism (McGuire, 2008;
Wurst, 2002). These Western Marxist archaeologies form a continuum of interre-
lated positions and ideas that range from the more scientific Classical Marxism to
the more humanistic Relational Marxism.
Critiques of Marxist approaches to archaeology rarely attempt to understand the
range and depth of positions that different Western approaches embody. This is
especially the case for Neo-Materialist critics (Harris & Cipolla, 2017). Rather than
doing the hard study required for nuanced understandings, they cherry pick ideas
from the complex range of Marxist thought. They then use the oversimplification
that they have produced to reject “Marxist” Archaeology.
Differences in the concept and use of the dialectic distinguish different approaches
to Marxism in general and in archaeology. Party communism makes the dialectic a
deterministic and teleological tool. Western Marxism dismisses the communist posi-
tion as not dialectical and as vulgar materialism (McGuire, 1992: 91–99). French
Structural Marxism replaces the dialectic with structuralism. Engels’ (1927) Dialec-
tics of Nature parallel much thought in complex adaptive systems theory or Chaos
theory (Woods & Grant, 2015). The perspective that I take is the relational dialectic
of Hegel as interpreted by Bertell Ollman (2003).
22 R. H. McGuire

Hegelian Relational Dialectic

Relational Dialectical thinking starts with social relations and not with social cate-
gories or the classification of concrete entities (such as classes, the economy, modes
of production). These entities are just appearances. A complex web of dialectically
related social relations creates society. A web of intricate interconnections creates any
given unit through its relationship to other entities. Masters do not exist without slaves
nor slaves without masters. The underlying social relationship of slavery creates both
master and slave. The unity of opposites recognizes that each social unit necessitates
the existence of its opposite and of the social relationship that creates them both.
A relational dialectic does not assume that the entities that make up the social
whole will fit peacefully together. They might fit, but the dynamics of change do not
spring from functional relations. Rather, relational contradictions inherent in the unity
of opposites drive change. Thus, slavery creates both the master and the slave. For
one to exist so too must the other, yet as opposites they are inherently in conflict. Each
has conflicting interests and a dissimilar lived experience in a shared history. These
relations do not simply change quantitatively or qualitatively. Quantitative changes
can lead to qualitative transformations, and qualitative transformation inevitably indi-
cates a quantitative change. Struggles that spring from relational contradictions may
result in quantitative changes in those relations that build to a qualitative transfor-
mation. Rebellion by slaves may lead the masters to enforce harsher and harsher
discipline, thereby heightening resistance until people overthrow slavery. The social
relations that spring from such a qualitative change remake the old with the addition
of the new.
A Relational Dialectic does not predict or explain social transformation (Ollman,
2003: 12). It is both a way of observing the world, and a method of investigation.
Explaining social change requires the dialectical analysis of historically grounded
social relations and contradictions. A scholar uses the Relational Dialectic as a
method to detect these asymmetries. A successful dialectical view of the world has
utility. It helps archaeologists to choose important problems and steers them to the
empirical observations needed to evaluate those problems. It provides a framework
for assessing empirical observations that help scholars to build knowledge, make
critique, and act in the world.
A Relational Marxism creates praxis (McGuire, 2008). Praxis is theoretically
informed action. Praxis springs from the realization that people make the social world
in their lived experience and that they can also subvert and alter that world. Successful
praxis necessitates that people know the world, critique the world, and take action
in the world. Action deprived of correct knowledge of the world will fail but simple
empiricism does not yield useful knowledge. Archaeologists construct knowledge
in a complex dialectic between the reality that they examine, the methods that they
employ, and the consciousness that they bring to that examination. They need to
be self-reflexive and critical about how reality and their consciousness affect their
enquiries and knowledge construction. If archaeologists do not critique the ethics,
politics, epistemology, and reality behind their knowledge, then their actions in the
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 23

world will be defective and their action may result in unforeseen, detrimental, and/or
counterproductive consequences. Critique lacking knowledge creates self-delusion
and critique lacking action leads to nihilism and despair.
Now that I have positioned myself, the reader might ask “why do archaeologists
need to consider Marxism?” Communism has diminished as a political force in the
world and the major Communist nations (Russia and China) have adopted nineteenth
century style Capitalisms without twentieth century liberal reforms. Doing archae-
ology is more and more about toys (drones, lidar, 3D printers, GPS etc.). Many
“scientific” archaeologists have little interest in theory they just want to play with
their toys. At the end of the twentieth century, Post-Modern archaeologist rejected
the totalizing framework of Marxism. In the twenty-first century, a new materialism
has appeared, and many archaeologists have eagerly adopted it and rejected Marxism
(Harris & Cipolla, 2017). I will argue that despite these factors, a Relational Marxism
still provides an insightful way to write the deep history of human economy and to
relate that history to modern praxis.

Neo-Materialism

Why should archaeologists use Marxism when we can play with bright and shiny
neo-materialisms? Newfangled bright and shiny things have attracted many theo-
retical archaeologists especially the Post-Modernist, British scholars such as Ian
Hodder (2012) and Michael Shanks who introduced Post Modernism to archae-
ology. They declare that Marxism is timeworn and exhausted. These new bright shiny
things involve a diversity of approaches that scholars have variously branded “post-
humanism,” “Object Agency,” “Thing Theory,” and the “New Materialism.” One of
Neo-Materialism’s most prominent advocates, Jane Bennett (2010: xvi) questions:
“Why did Marx come to stand for materialism?”
I am not a philosopher and I am not qualified to fully engage with the nuances
or variants of Neo-Materialism. I am an archaeologist. As an archaeologist, I will
critique the concepts that Symmetrical Archaeologists have adopted from Neo-
Materialism and their rejection of a Relational Marxism. I write to debate archae-
ology not philosophy. The faults and errors that I find are the sins of archaeologists
not necessarily the philosophers that they read.
Neo-Materialism ascends from the ruins of Post-Modernism. It seeks to replace
discourse and the linguistic turn with the material. Bill Brown (2003) describes
Thing Theory to examine object–culture relations in literature. Bennett (2010)
advocates for thing power, that is taking the material seriously. Timothy Morton
(2017) offers an Object-oriented Ontology that does not privilege the human over
nonhuman things. Many archaeologists have also read Manuel DeLanda’s (2016)
assemblage theory’s bottom-up framework that emphasizes fluidity, exchangeability,
and multiple functionalities in the analysis of social complexity.
These perspectives share important commonalities, most significantly that
scholars should examine things, objects in their own right and not merely as a way
24 R. H. McGuire

of understanding the human. They define humans, non-humans, and material things
as actants, that is active agents in cultural change and diversity. This broad concept
of actant and agency depends upon a denial of dualisms such as culture/nature,
animate/inanimate, thinking/being, subject/object, and human/animal. Putting all
things on the same plain requires a rejection of anthropocentric approaches that sets
humans at the center of our analysis. Finally, they shift the focus on epistemology
(how humans know the world) to stress in its place ontology (the nature of being in
the world).
There is a lot that I approve of in Neo-Materialism and their argument to take
things seriously seduces archaeologists. Giving priority to the study of the material
in its own right spotlights the stuff that archaeologists dig up, examine, and study.
This priority makes things the objects of our study and not just a lesser means to
access human agency and cultural change. Concepts such as “assemblage” embrace
archaeological logic and I have even heard some advocates attribute archaeology
as one origin point for the concept. Generally, when reading Neo-Materialism I
generally go yes, yes, yes until I reach a point where I can only go no, no, no,
or maybe hell no. That point occurs when the Neo-Materialists equate things with
people and ignore human suffering.

Symmetrical Archaeology

We should not be surprised that archaeologists have been inspired in various ways by
these approaches. This inspiration manifests in the Symmetrical Archaeology and
in the work of its principle advocates Michael Shanks (Olsen et al., 2012), Bijorn
Olsen (2010), Christopher Witmore (2014), and Þóra Pétursdóttir (2017). Symmet-
rical archaeology springs from a critique of postmodern archaeology. Symmetrical
archaeologists accused Post Modernism of being preoccupied with the individual
and the socio-cultural and of forgetting the ‘thingly component’ of the past. They
objected to Post Modernism’s asymmetrical relationship between people and things,
that favored the human over the thingly.
These archaeologists makes the relationship between people and things symmet-
rical. They want to study non-humans most specifically things not merely as useful
stuff or as objects that humans fill with meaning, symbols, and identities but rather
as active agents or actants. They reject the idea of human exceptionalism as “foolish-
ness.” They dismiss putting humans at the center of everything, and reject Anthropor-
centric approaches. Symmetrical archaeology generates a flat ontology that places
things, animals, and humans on the same plain (Olsen & Witmore, 2015). They
admit the possibility of highlighting the human, but they begin their analysis with
no assumptions about the priority of people.
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 25

Dualism and the Dialectic

The polemic of symmetrical archaeologists discards any dualism. Dualisms prioritize

Western Ontology and in doing so obscure other non-Western Ontologies. They reject
the essentialism of Dualisms. They assume that every entity holds characteristics (an
essence) that create its identity and function in contrast to the essence of another
entity. Dualisms do not always define the same oppositions. They worry that dualisms
enact groupings that may or may not exist and that may or may not be valuable to
analysis. This polemic paradoxically depends upon a dualism between Cartesian
(dualistic) thought and relational (non-dualistic) thinking.
Symmetrical archaeologists (Harris & Cipolla, 2017) base their denunciation of
Marxism in large part on this disdain for dualism. They reject Marxism out of hand by
cherry picking from Mark Leone’s Marxist studies of representation and presenting
Leone’s critical archaeology as the whole of Marxism. They also use a shallow
misreading of the dialectic as a straw dog.
They reject the dialectic as imperfectly relational or as a type of dualism. They
find Daniel Miller’s (2012) dialectical research on materiality inadequately relational.
They profoundly misread the unity of opposites in a Marxist dialectic as a dualism.
They do not even consider the Hegelian relational dialectic that I will argue is a more
powerful tool than the relational empiricism that they embrace.
Calling the dialectic a dualism miscomprehends the core concept of the unity of
opposites. The dialectical opposites do not have essences that define them. Rather,
an underlying social relationship generates the social entities and changes in that
relationship alter the entities. Polemical descriptions of the dialectic focus on two
opposites to simplify the concept. But in actual historical cases, the underlying rela-
tionships are intricate, multifractionated and not simply dualistic. In the U.S. south,
the underlying relationship of antebellum slavery created the master and the slave in
Alabama, but it also created the overseer, the cotton merchant in Charleston and the
textile workers in Manchester, England. A slave rebellion that disrupted the produc-
tion of cotton or a strike that stopped the looms could have transformed the whole
intricate web of relations that form the mode of production.
To dismiss the active and relational character of the dialectic, critics define a
tripartite dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis (Harris & Cipolla, 2017: 91).
This frequently used definition is not relational (it is dualistic) because it is mechan-
ical and because it leads to closure (synthesis). The triad does not reflect a rela-
tional Hegelian dialectic or Marx’s use of the dialectic (Mueller, 1958). The thesis,
antithesis, synthesis triad originates with Emanuel Kant and his students (McFarland,
2002). Kant defined thesis and antithesis and later his student Johann Gottlieb Fichte
followed this dyad with synthesis to create the tripartite dialectic. In a single passage,
Hegel references Kant’s use of thesis and anti-thesis but he does not accept Kant’s
definition of the dialectic or use the term “synthesis” (Kaufmann, 1966). Marx never
referenced or used the tripartite dialectic. He used a relational Hegelian dialectic
(Ollman, 2003). Equating the tripartite dialectic with Hegel and Marx result from
inept readings of Hegel (or no reading at all). In archaeology, this misreading allows
26 R. H. McGuire

critics to mischaracterize all concepts of the dialectic as dualisms and to dismiss

out of hand the relational dialectic used by many Anglophone, Marxist archaeolo-
gists. These critics do not realize that the relational dialectic resolves the dualism
Symmetrical Archaeology creates between Cartesian vs Relational thinking.

History

Symmetrical Archaeology scorns political economy as much as it disdains dualities.

Political Economy is the core of Historical Materialism. Just as with the dialectic there
are many interpretations of Historical Materialism, but all approaches focus on human
societies and historical transformation. Historical materialism theorizes that the mate-
rial means and relations that humans use collectively to produce the necessities of life
drives developments and transformations in human society. Marxist Archaeologists
study things and materiality to understand how human societies change. Symmet-
rical Archaeologists study objects and materiality to comprehend things in their own
right.
This difference represents an essential divide between Marxist and Symmetrical
Archaeologies and creates a basic disparity in how each archaeology studies history.
Both archaeologies empirically examine material remains. Symmetrical Archae-
ology, however, does not use this study to interpret social change. These archae-
ologists argue that we must thoroughly understand thing history before we can study
cultural change. Symmetrical Archaeologists research the history of things (artifact
biographies) from their raw materials, to their manufacture, to their uses, and finally
to their disposal and decay. To fully understand artifact biographies, symmetrical
studies also contemplate the shifting relations that these things enter into with other
things, humans, and animals. This is history as exhaustive, never ending description.
Andreassen et al. (2010) studied an abandoned Soviet artic mining town called
Pyramiden. The authors reference but they do not investigate the economic, political,
social, and cultural processes that created the mines and that led to their expiry. They
ignore political economy. Instead, they write a descriptive history of buildings and
things and of their post human decay. They illustrate the study with stunning artistic
photographs that aestheticizes the abandonment and decay to produce ruins porn.
After viewing this study, I realized that my meager skills as a photographer prevent
me from ever being a Symmetrical Archaeologist.

Symmetrical Ontology

Ruins porn beguiles the observer with rotting things and human absence. This absence
echoes Symmetrical Archaeology’s denunciation of an anthropocentric archaeology.
Symmetry springs from a flat ontology that presupposes humans, animals, and things
have the same nature of being in the world.
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 27

To the contrary, Marxist Archaeologists assert that people, animals, and things
have unique ontologies. In Capital, Marx (1906: 198) compares bees and humans
based on the absence or presence of consciousness:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many
an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from
the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects
it in reality.

Marxist archaeologists have pointed out that things do not suffer as humans do
(Bernbeck, 2018). Things do not feel physical pain, anguish, loss, exhaustion, agony,
or fear. They do not shiver in the snow or burn in the sun. If you prick things, they
do not bleed. If you tickle them, they do not laugh.
The cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011: 172–188) compares a tree and
a house. He begins by rejecting the oppositions of nature and culture and natural
organism vs cultural design. He points to many parallels between trees and houses.
Both trees and houses are lived in. DNA does not simply determine the form of the
tree but instead the tree’s form develops through being in the world. Similarly, a
house does not emerge as a final static thing but rather as a material process built
by the people and animals that inhabit it. Both trees and houses develop from the
relational meshwork of people, animals, plants, materials, weather, etc. He concludes
that the difference between tree and house is not natural organism vs cultural design
but rather in the degree of human engagement. He argues that this proves that trees
and houses exist in the same ontological realm.
Ingold’s arguments significantly develop a relational understanding of trees or
houses but things and people do not have to exist on the same ontological plain
for us to understand them relationally. Ingold’s similarities do not alter the truth of
Marx’s contrast between bees and architects. His observation about the differences
being in the degree of human engagement is insightful but it does not validate the
absence of ontological difference. Trees may also vary in their degree of human
involvement. For instance, a topiary has a high degree of human involvement and a
pine tree in the forest has less human involvement. But to understand the difference
between a topiary and a forest pine we must discuss human consciousness, concepts
of aesthetics, and even class relations, aspects of being human in the world but not
aspects of being thingly in the world.
Þóra Pétursdóttir (2017) studies “drift matter” (marine debris) that washes up
along the coastlines of northern Norway and Iceland. This material drifts and amasses
in the intertidal zones of these countries. Drift matter is a resource for humans who
walk the beach or it can be a global environmental problem of great concern. Péturs-
dóttir insightfully discusses how drift matter exposes both opportunities and barriers
for an Anthropocene Archaeology. She discusses how the physical and ideological
climate change of the Anthropocene will affect the craft of archaeology and how can
archaeology meaningfully address the challenges of the Anthropocene. She seeks to
take drift matter seriously as actant things that exist out of hand, in a post-human
space.
28 R. H. McGuire

Tragically, in the world today, post-human material actants are not the only things
washing up on beaches. Over the last decade, thousands of people have drowned in
the Mediterranean Sea fleeing war, violence, poverty, oppression, and exploitation.
We all remember the tragic photograph of twenty-seven-months-old Alan Kurdi’s
body washed up on a Turkish beach (Kurdi, 2018). If we accept a flat ontology, a
symmetrical archaeology that eschews an anthropocentric approach, then we must
initially treat drift matter and the body of a child homogeneously. Olsen and Witmore
(2015) argue that ontology should be flat only in the first instance possibly allowing
us in the next instance to recognize the humanity and tragedy of a dead child on the
beach. For me, there is no instance in which I can accept a symmetrical ontology
that would equate drift matter and a dead child.
Yet at least some Symmetrical Archaeologists do liken the being of things with
human suffering. These archaeologists claim that we should give more attention to
exploited things than to humans. Harris and Cipolla (2017: 185) write; “So following
this logic, rather than freeing people from the tyranny of colonialism, it is things
themselves that need our assistance.” Olsen (2003: 100) argues; “Archaeologists
should unite in the defense of things, a defense of those subaltern members of the
collective that have been silenced and ‘othered’ by the imperialist social and human-
istic discourses.” This equation of human exploitation and suffering with the being
of things is the moment when I go hell no. In a brilliant critique of the Symmet-
rical Archaeology, Severn Fowles (2016) argues that in the second half of the twen-
tieth century non-Western peoples resisted being subjects of Western research. Their
resistance interrupted Western scholarship and led some anthropologists and related
scholars to study non-human objects as quasi-human subjects. It is easier to research
things rather than people because things do not talk back (yet another ontological
difference).
Praxis is the most essential difference between a Relational Marxist Archaeology
and the Symmetrical Archaeology. Praxis is conscious theoretically based human
action that comes from knowing the world, critiquing the world, and acting in the
world. To engage in Praxis, we need to understand the relations and entanglements
that people enter with each other, animals, things, and plants. A relational dialectic
offers a method to diagnose and investigate the active role of non-human things. But
if we wish to design, facilitate, or participate in transformative change we must study
the relationship of these non-human actants to conscious, purposive human agency.

Why Marxism?

Marxism is first and foremost a Praxis that seeks to know capitalism, critique capi-
talism (and itself), and transform capitalism. Despite the critique of Neo-Materialism
and others, Marxism remains a viable, profound approach to archaeology. This leaves
the central question of this symposium why should we apply Marxism to the deep
past? I offer two answers to this question: (1) If we wish to transform Capitalism we
must demonstrate that alternatives to Capitalism existed in the past and that we can
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 29

therefore create alternatives in the future, and (2) Marxism offers archaeologists an
intellectual tool kit that they can use to understand non-Capitalist economies.

Capitalism as a Product of History

The most basic and blatant lie of Capitalism is that the relations of Capitalism spring
from human nature. Capitalist maintains that private property, individualism, profit,
wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, competitive markets, and economic
maximization are inherent in the human condition. Based on this claim, supporters
argue that Capitalism does not have a history. If the key features of Capitalism do
not have a history of development, then they cannot be changed. If human hands and
minds did not create Capitalism, then human hands and minds cannot transform it
into something else.
Marx and Engels studied “primitive” societies to expose the blatant lie. Friedrich
Engels (1972) published The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State
and a short work called “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to
Man.” The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State used contemporary
Social Evolutionary theory and classical sources to discuss the origins and processes
of development for the key features of Capitalism. In the shorter work Engels argues
that labor shapes human’s relation to nature interdependently with human social
relations. The Ethnological Notebooks in the Grundrisse contain most of Marx’s
(1974) unpublished notes and observations on pre-capitalist modes of production.
Marx and Engels studied non-capitalist modes of production to demonstrate that the
relations of Capitalism had a history. Human hands and minds had made Capitalism
and they could therefore transform it.
Karl Polanyi (2001) critiqued the universality of Capitalist Market Society in
his seminal work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time. He showed that wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system,
competitive markets, and economic maximization were not universal characteris-
tics of human economies but rather products of the development of market soci-
eties. He contrasted the market economy driven by scarcity, individual desires, and
economic maximization with gift and redistributive economies where the economy
was embedded in social and cultural relations. Formalist critics of Polanyi argued
that scarcity and economic maximization existed in all societies while Substantivists
supported Polanyi’s position that these things only became important when histor-
ical processes disembedded the economy from the social. Much more recently David
Graeber (2001) accepts that scarcity and economic maximization result from historic
development, but he rejects the dualistic opposition of formalist and substantivist.
He instead seeks to understand how peoples in different times and contexts found
meaning in their actions.
30 R. H. McGuire

Marxism as an Intellectual Tool Kit

Marxism is a rich conceptual source of models and theories for the study of cultural
change. Many others considering the conditions of economic development of their
own times have interpreted anew Marx’s basic—and often somewhat ambiguous—
observations (Foster, 2016; Patel & Moore, 2017). This fruitful tradition of scholar-
ship has produced a copious body of theories, concepts, ideas, and insights on human
history (Chapman, 2003; Cobb, 2000; Earle & Spriggs, 2015; McGuire & Saitta,
1996; Trigger, 2003). Marx’s focus on the role of socially constituted labor in the
production and reproduction of real life—and his realization that these social relations
are objectified in various ways, including through material culture—is compatible
with the craft of archaeology (Shanks & McGuire, 1996). Thus, the archaeologist V.
Gordon Childe (1944: 1) noted that material culture reflects and participates in the
social relations that produce it and that we can therefore study these social relations
using material culture.
The key instrument in the Marxist tool kit is the method of class analysis. Marx’s
analysis focused on the relations between classes and class factions. Complex rela-
tions between material conditions, consciousness, and social agency create classes
and class fractions. Class analysis starts with real individuals, their actions, and the
material (economic) conditions under which they live/lived, both the conditions that
they inherited from the past and the conditions that they create/created through their
actions. A dialectical archaeology should start and end with the real lived experience
of people and seek an understanding of how people transformed that experience and
that experience transformed people.
Marx developed class analysis to study Capitalism. He did not develop it to explain
all human history. Cultural anthropologists working at the end of the twentieth
century demonstrated that a Marxist class analysis could be applied to any social
groups that have common interests and consciousness (Bloch, 1985: 162–163). Any
group of individuals who share a common identity, and mutual interests can form a
group consciousness to engage in social agency. This demonstration extended class
analysis into pre-class societies. It also opened the door for complex analyses that
include gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and age as well as classes and class factions.
For example, if scholars accept either a totalitarian notion of Marxism (class is
the root of all exploitation) or a totalitarian notion of Feminism (gender is the root
of all exploitation), then Marxism and Feminism must be at odds. The Feminist
ideas of intersectionality and of entry point, however, offers an alternative to these
totalitarian ideas (Wylie, 1991). If we are to take diversity and the complexity of
oppression seriously, then we must recognize that oppression derives from the inter-
sectionality of many relationships including those of gender, class, race, sexuality,
and ethnicity (Battle-Baptiste, 2011). Each of these provides an entry point to the
study of social relations and of oppression. Marxists will enter the study of the social
world with the analysis of class and from this entry point examine the intersection-
alities between class, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity in the construction of
oppression. Feminists will begin their analysis with gender. As long as Feminists
2 Writing the Deep History of Human Economy 31

seek a radical transformation of gender relations that must also address class, race,
sexuality, and ethnicity (hooks, 2000) and Marxists recognize that relations of class
also must involve relations of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity than the two
approaches can be compatible and complementary.
Even though every new shiny theory wants to dismiss Marxism out of hand,
Marx lebt. Archaeological advocates for a New Materialism dismiss Marxism. They
do this by distorting the relational dialectic as oppositional thinking. They provide
a weak alternative in Neo-Materialism. This alternative maintains the status quo
of Capitalism, limits our ability to critique Capitalism, and weakens our capacity to
proffer alternative to it. A relational dialectical Marxism still provides a profound way
to address the deep history of human economy. It confronts the lie that Capitalism
results from an unchanging human nature. It demonstrates that human hands and
minds built Capitalism and thus, human hands and minds may transform Capitalism.

References

Andreassen, E., Bjerck, H., & Olsen, B. (2010). Persistent memories: Pyramiden—A Soviet mining
town in the High Arctic. Tapir Academic Press.
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Chapter 3
Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms
of Value: Thinking from the Study
of Ancestral Central America

Rosemary A. Joyce

Abstract A turn to the archaeologically documented past as a source of data for

generalizing models explaining the roots of contemporary economic reality can
involve treating pasts that were shaped under far different social conditions as equiv-
alent to the contemporary world of nation states and global economies. Using case
studies from ancient Mexico and Central America, I examine two sources of incom-
mensurability that should be taken into account in any attempt to think from the past of
economic relations to the present. The first is how labour is conceived of, counted, and
understood in different situations. As feminist scholars of the contemporary economy
have long noted, large areas of economic activity by women are routinely excluded
in modern analyses, based on a tacit distinction between household labour (viewed
as intimate, domestic, and ruled only by naturalized relations of sex and age) and
extra-domestic labour. For the societies of ancient Central America, such a division
simply did not exist. Accordingly, the standards of value and exchange that emerged
in such societies were entangled in social relations that need to be accounted for
before these societies are used as evidence for long-term human economic patterns.

Reconsideration of the “deep past” of contemporary socioeconomic relations is

enjoying a remarkable moment of public attention: whether the massive reconsid-
eration of debt by David Graeber (2014), James Scott’s somewhat more limited
discussion of changes to what he thought he knew about the emergence of urbanism
in Mesopotamia (Scott, 2017), or the universalizing of modern measures of economic
inequality by the team of archaeologists led by Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith
(Kohler & Smith, 2018), authors aiming at transdisciplinary or even popular audi-
ences are returning to archaeological data to trace genealogies for the contemporary
situation in which we find ourselves.
However, in the process, these works can be insufficiently critical of the terms of
intellectual conceptualization under which archaeological reports—often treated as

R. A. Joyce (B)
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
e-mail: rajoyce@berkeley.edu

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 35

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_3
36 R. A. Joyce

“data” for these projects—were formed. In this paper, I seek to contribute to a critique
of the way archaeologists, and hence others relying on archaeological information,
understand and thus characterize activities and relations as “economic”. It is not an
accident that I put understanding before characterization here. I argue that before
archaeologists ever create observations treated by themselves or others as “data”,
they have already formed ideas of what is observable, how the observable can and
should be measured, and often even what the explanatory variables will be.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will do three things. First, I will consider how
certain understandings are tacitly employed, even in relatively sophisticated contem-
porary work, that equate women’s activities in something called “the household” with
a non-economic sector. Second, using material from Mexico and Central America,
I will show that the distinction between the “household” and a presumed political
or public economic sector does not hold up. Finally, I will link these observations
to writing by feminist and Marxist-Feminist critics of standard economic models.
While my case studies come from a specific region, I argue that the critique I am
presenting offers insights for many other instances where an initial division between
public and private, economy and household, is relied on by archaeologists or those
using the information archaeologists generate.
In speaking about “women” in this paper, I am not ignoring the actual complexity
of past gender relations whose appreciation is one of the central developments in
contemporary archaeology. This includes research that treats assumptions of binary
heterosexuality as historically contingent, demands attention to intersectionality
between gender and other dimensions of social position, and thus resists collapsing
people into two simple categories of men and women (Joyce, 2001b, 2008). It is
remarkable how little impact this work on gender and sexuality in the past has had
on recent literature on ancient economies. In most works I would include under this
rubric, even when the society at issue is one where researchers have demonstrated
through deep and sustained analysis that it makes no sense to talk about a unified
category of “women” juxtaposed to an equally unified category of “men”, precisely
such a dichotomy is usually employed. As a beginning point, however, it is helpful
to see how recent works have treated women as an aggregate subject, and even if
they have, in models of ancient economies. My case study then considers a situa-
tion where economic relations surrounding the main standards of value implicate
gendered labour, at least of women of certain classes, in ways that make considering
gendered subjectivity indispensable for understanding the production of economic
value. In my conclusion, I will return to this point, suggesting that more critical
archaeology of the economy is advanced by more critical archaeology of gender.

How Models of the Ancient Economy Treat Women

To begin, let us examine how authors expressly addressing economic relations in the
past, and in particular, relations of economic inequality, treat women as individual-
ized embodied persons whose life chances are coordinated because of their similar
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 37

biology. A simple experiment consists of attending to the way scholars index gender,
sex, or women in the newly visible works dedicated to economic relations in the deep
past. Often, the answer is that these dimensions of social difference are not explicitly
addressed.
For example, James C. Scott, in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest
States (2017), does not include gender or sex as index terms. In his retelling of
the history of the state in Mesopotamia, women appear only as a subentry under
slavery and slaves (“women as”). The majority of in-text discussions having to do
with women are indexed under terms that relate to women as reproductive bodies:
fertility, menopause, maternal mortality, ovulation, and puberty. These two lines of
discussion, women as enslaved, and women as reproductive bodies, are intimately
related by a running argument that states relied on “unfree labor” that led to “atten-
tion to ‘husbanding’ the subject population, including women, as a form of wealth,
like livestock, in which fertility and high rates of reproduction were encouraged”
(Scott, 2017: 29). Scott draws out the equation of women with livestock in a section
called “Speculation on Human Parallels” where he seeks to extend information about
changes non-human animals experience with domestication to humans, specifically
women, in early sedentary societies. Generalizing from bioarchaeological study of
skeletal remains from Abu Hureya he writes:
Women in grain villages had characteristic bent-under toes and deformed knees that came
from long hours kneeling and rocking back and forth grinding grain. It was a small but telling
way that new subsistence routines– what today would be called a repetitive stress injury–
shaped our bodies to new purposes, much as the work animals domesticated later– cattle,
horses, and donkeys–bore skeletal signatures of their work routines. (Scott, 2017: 83)

While offered as part of a general discussion of “self-domestication” of the human

species, the slippage here is telling: it is women’s bodies that are domesticated, and
specifically, the signs of their work grinding grain that makes women equivalent to
“animals domesticated later”. Men do not appear in these passages as domesticated
animals, even though bioarchaeologists document alterations to labouring bodies of
various sexes from their work regimes (Agarwal et al., 2015; Bolger, 2010).
That this is not simply oversight is underlined by the subsequent discussion in a
section titled “A Note on Fertility and Population”. Here, ignoring decades of critique
by archaeologists, Scott uses selected studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers as a
proxy for historic populations, to argue that “the burden of a much shorter spacing of
children…is much reduced” in sedentary populations, while “the greater value of the
children as a labor force in agriculture is enhanced” (Scott, 2017: 114). From this,
he projects a raft of apparently inevitable changes to women’s reproductive biology
caused by sedentism, including earlier menstruation, ovulation (encouraged, he says,
by a high carbohydrate diet), and extension of “a woman’s reproductive life”. In two
short pages Scott returns to one of the enduring tropes about women in the past,
that all women in the past were primarily valued socially for their reproductive
potential and histories. This is an assumption that quite notably has been troubled by
actual research on the varied histories of gendered and reproductive lives evident in
bioarchaeology of early farming communities. These studies demonstrate variation
38 R. A. Joyce

between settlements, most not showing the patterns Scott emphasizes. Bolger (2010:
511–512) contrasts observations from Abu Hureya with the results of studies at other
sites, including Çatalhöyük, where bioarchaeological differences were not marked
between men and women (Agarwal et al., 2015).
Women come in for the most extended discussion in a chapter called “Population
Control: Bondage and War”. Women, in Scott’s understanding, are mainly valuable
as sources of additional labouring bodies. This is made explicit in a section of this
chapter called “Slavery as ‘Human Resources’ Strategy”. Here we are told that
women and children were particularly prized as slaves. Women were often taken into local
households as wives, concubines, or servants, and children were likely to be quickly assim-
ilated, though at an inferior status. Within a generation or two they and their progeny were
likely to have been incorporated into the local society… Women captives were at least as
important for their reproductive services as for their labor. Given the problems of infant and
maternal mortality in the early state and the need of both the patriarchal family and the state
for agrarian labor, women captives were a demographic dividend. Their reproduction may
have played a major role in alleviating the otherwise unhealthy effects of concentration…
Here I cannot resist the obvious parallel with the domestication of livestock, which requires
taking control over their reproduction… women slaves of reproductive age were prized in
large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.
(Scott, 2017: 168–169)

Shortly after this, Scott provides a discussion of male slaves who, he informs us,
were employed “outside the households”, away from the centre of urbanism, in “the
most brutal and dangerous work” of mining, quarrying, and other manly tasks (Scott,
2017: 169–170). Women, it would seem, are natural sex slaves and “breeders”, while
male labouring bodies are naturalized as brute force.
It is worth noting that both primary and secondary sources cited in the same chapter
are inconsistent with this uniform treatment of women as a group, and inconsistent
with treating the population as divided into a group of men and a corresponding
group of women. One poetic text cited, for example, mentions the experiences of
three different female subjects: “the slave woman”, “her mistress”, and “the widow”
(Scott, 2017: 164). As serious scholarship on gender in ancient Mesopotamia affirms,
there was not a single categorical status for women (Bahrani, 2001; McCorriston,
1997; Wright, 1996). Free or unfree, unmarried, married, or widowed, member of a
wealthy family, a ruling family, or a temple community, women’s experiences were
varied and their roles in production, distribution, and consumption of goods were
varied as well.
These highly stereotyped assumptions—most offered with little or no reliance
on cited sources, which often are dismissed as understating the oppressive condi-
tions Scott projects onto ancient Mesopotamia—culminate in a final summary of the
argument:
In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest
at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor. It would be instructive, but
alas impossible, to know, in the light of the epidemiological challenges of early state centers,
the importance of slave women’s reproduction to the demographic stability and growth of
the state. The domestication of non-slave women in the early grain state may also be seen
in the same light. A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 39

labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has
the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general. (Scott, 2017: 181)

Scott, of course, is not an archaeologist; as a historical researcher crossing the

boundary between political science and anthropology, he privileges written records
over other forms of evidence. He characterizes many aspects of the past whose story
he is telling as lacking evidence, including such topics as the “collapse of states”,
“hunting and gathering”, “nomadism”, and “resettlement” (in Mesopotamia, specif-
ically, but generalized as a global strategy of states)—all in fact areas in which
archaeological research is relatively robust.
So it is worth examining an approach to related issues by archaeologists. Ten
Thousand Years of Inequality, edited by Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith, has a
similar synthetic aim, a broader global scope, and an explicit model of how economic
wealth differentials can be assessed in the past directly from material remains, not
just texts. They frame their core question as understanding the “growth of wealth
disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and
animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale” (Kohler et al., 2017: 619).
As with Scott’s book, the published volume that summarizes this project does not
include gender or sex as index terms. Similar conclusions about women as contrib-
utors to economic life in the transition to agriculture reappear, although not with the
absolute equation of women and domesticated animals. An index term for “women,
mobility and health of”, leads to an introductory discussion about the origins of
social inequality (Smith et al., 2018: 9). Here, we are told that “in areas where
farming developed during the Holocene” (as well as areas where sedentary life was
possible without farming) “reduced mobility improved women’s energy balance and
decreased interbirth spacing”. In the concluding chapter, women reappear in the guise
of mothers, freed by use of cow and goat milk to “wean their children and resume
bearing earlier” (Kohler et al., 2018: 307).
While gender doesn’t appear as an index term, it does figure in the discussion of
inequality in a chapter on Mesopotamia, as a variable that would have been useful if
burial remains had been identified by sex (Stone, 2018). With this exception, the book
treats its subject—household level wealth differences—without explicit considera-
tion of the varying positions of men and women. Implicitly, women appear as parents
of children who may inherit their position and receive “high parental investment”
(Smith et al., 2018: 11, 21). We are told that “households or families go through a
developmental cycle” that includes “child bearing and rearing”, implying the pres-
ence if not the agency of female parents (Peterson & Drennan, 2018: 47). While
offering a much more grounded empirical discussion than Scott, the participants in
this project depart from some of the same assumptions Scott employs: that women are
primarily active as embodied sources of children, always encompassed by a family
structure in which the active political (and thus economic) agency is implicitly that
of men.
The contributors to this project use a metric based on the GINI coefficient, widely
used in contemporary economic analyses as a measure of inequality in income distri-
bution. Because there is no easy way to measure income archaeologically across
40 R. A. Joyce

cultures, they developed a proxy based on house structures to measure a different

economic dimension, household wealth, distinguishing “embodied, relational and
material aspects of wealth” that do not necessarily co-vary (Kohler et al., 2017: 619).
As a result, this analysis cannot easily address gender-based variation, because the
wealth being measured is held by an aggregate group that merges men and women.
Nor would an attempt to calculate something closer to the contemporary GINI coeffi-
cients assessing income distribution be much more likely to help. Economic activity
that is not formally registered as producing income is excluded from calculations of
the GINI coefficient. While normally exemplified as represented by income derived
from the informal economy of barter, illicit trade, and payment for services outside
legal recording, this also includes one startlingly large sector of every contemporary
economy: the unpaid, unreported work that is put into maintaining residential life at
the scale of the household. As noted by feminist analysts, this includes the largely
unwaged labour of women bound to households through social ties rather than by
paid employment, work done by women involving structural maintenance (including
cleaning), provisioning of residents (shopping, cooking, sewing), and care of others
(including childcare and eldercare) (Hoyman, 1987). This labour effectively has no
value in contemporary economic analysis. Merging men and women together in GINI
coefficient equivalents based on treating house structures as reservoirs of wealth does
not correct for the exclusion of this constant maintenance labour from formal consid-
eration, while leaving the account of the ancient economy troubled by the same issues
feminist scholars have criticized in analyses of contemporary economies.
When women appear in these new deep histories, they are most often seen in
surprisingly uniform ways. Unenslaved women are presented as maintaining a sector
of social life that is not seen as central to something called “the economy”. When
they are recognized as part of the economy, it is normally either as adjuncts to male-
ordered economic processes, or even as objectified labouring bodies, perhaps even
normative subjects of chattel slavery. Yet even in the societies under examination by
the authors of such deep histories, the claim that women play a role in the economy
only as tools for the agency of men is questionable.
A common tendency is to treat as exceptions those women who form part of polit-
ical leadership, or who are recorded as independently owning property. Repeatedly,
we are told that these women only have this kind of economic agency because of
something unique that happened: the end of a marriage endowing legal indepen-
dence and control over an estate, or inheritance of a position and estate as a sole heir;
although the same unique things seem to happen quite often.
More troubling than this kind of exceptionalism, in which individual women count
as quasi-men, is a systematic and usually inexplicit assumption that women’s efforts
were normally not recognized to their credit. Here, I want to turn to Maidens, Meal
and Money, which is perhaps one of the clearest classic ethnographic statements
of this (Meillassoux, 1981). Women, we are told, are significant to “the economy”
both as the ultimate origin of new labouring bodies (that is, children—incidentally
rendering all women heteronormative) and as a force of labouring bodies them-
selves—but whose labour is seen as just support for everyday life of the family,
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 41

accruing credit only to the head of the family (rendering all families as patriarchal
structures exploiting women as a class, and young men as a temporary category).
In the archaeology of Mesoamerica, this kind of thinking leads to claims that even
documented production by women of textiles that formed the key political valuable,
standard of exchange, and medium of political tribute in hierarchical political orga-
nizations produced no value for, and no social credit to, the women whose work
was required to make these pieces of cloth. What I want to do in the next section of
this paper is use the Mesoamerican case to begin to rethink how we might avoid the
naturalizations of heteronormativity, individuality, patriarchy, and labour alienation
that can be treated as givens if they are not explicitly questioned.

Making an Ancestral Economy in Mexico and Central

America

Much of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador
are usually discussed by archaeologists as a single culture area, Mesoamerica (Joyce,
2004). To the extent that this formulation is defensible, it reflects histories that resulted
in a linked network of politically administered societies that were incorporated into
the Spanish colonial empire in the sixteenth century. Anthropologists who defined the
Mesoamerican Cultural Area stressed a core of shared values, embodied in cultural
practices including the use of interlocking calendar systems; a vision of cosmic
order in which humans occupy a middle world between upper and lower worlds; and
religious beliefs and practices in which forces of nature, sometimes anthropomor-
phized, and ancestral beings were engaged with by human specialists. As defined, all
the societies that were recognized as Mesoamerican were primarily reliant on agri-
culture, with the northern boundary of the network set to coincide with the appear-
ance in northern Mexico of mobile societies in which gathering and hunting were
more important, coinciding with the edge of more arid environments. The southern
boundary of the network was, in contrast, less about environmental and subsistence
differences, and more concerned with political structure, with state-level, highly
centralized hierarchical societies a hallmark of “Mesoamerica” and absent from its
southern neighbours, conceived of as classic examples of chiefdom society.
Mesoamerica as defined encompassed a high diversity of spoken languages, with
a few language groups being entirely, or almost entirely, contained within its loose
borders. This included the Maya languages of Guatemala and Belize, and adjacent
Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, and the language families of the Gulf of Mexico,
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and Valley of Oaxaca. Ancestral versions of these languages
were recorded using writing systems that ranged from the fully phonetic Maya script
to more ideographic scripts used elsewhere, all unified by employing a base-20
number system expressed using at most three signs (for zero, one, and five), especially
to record calendrical dates in a calendar of common structure. Linguists note that
42 R. A. Joyce

contemporary languages spoken in this region share features as a result of intensive

historic interactions, not simply inherited from a common ancestral language.
For my purposes, one of the most significant things about the network of societies
glossed as “Mesoamerican” is their long-term use of a small number of items as valu-
ables, fostered by and fostering the integration of relations recognized by analysts as
an economy (Joyce, 2000). Some scholars have even employed Immanuel Waller-
stein’s world-systems theory as a model for Mesoamerica (Blanton & Feinman, 1984;
Smith & Berdan, 2000). World-systems theory is seen as particularly useful at the
moments when the most extensive empires were active, those centred on two cities
in central Mexico which grew to importance at different moments in Mesoamerican
history, Teotihuacan (with a peak in population ca. 200–600 AD), and Tenochti-
tlan (growing steadily from ca. 1325 CE until its development was truncated by
the Spanish invasion). Conceived as a “world-system”, Mesoamerica was a polit-
ical economy in which a small urban elite extracted surplus raw materials from a
periphery for use in manufacturing in the core, where labour increased the value of
these unworked materials.
From my perspective, a weakness of this model is the failure to account for
one of the most historically interesting things about the transactions recognized as
“economic” among this network of societies: the unusual nature of the basic media of
exchange and standards of value. The Mesoamerican economy is famously where, as
Rene Millon (1955) put it, “money grew on trees”, in the form of the seeds extracted
from cacao pods, which could be converted into the raw material for chocolate,
and were recorded as used for payments to political leaders. The Mesoamerican
economy, especially in its most hierarchical tribute states and empires, also used a
second organic material, cotton, as another standard of value, in the form of cotton
cloth. Both of these perishable and renewable organics are unusual as media of
exchange when compared to other ancient economies. That both cotton and cacao
could be cultivated easily in the peripheries of the two highland cities that centred
proposed Mesoamerican world systems challenges their control by authorities. With
the added consideration of limitations on transport due to the lack of domesticated
animals and consequent reliance on human porters, it is clear that these materials do
not lend themselves to accumulation at the political centres.
What was completely feasible, and is clearly evident in sources from a variety of
Mesoamerican societies, is the use of cloth and cacao as measures of value. Individual
cacao seeds and packages of 400 seeds were basic units of counting tribute in the
world system centred on Tenochtitlan (Berdan & Anawalt, 1992). Measured lengths
of cloth served as the second standard of value for tribute, one that is attested both
for Tenochtitlan and in public records of courtly life for the earlier Classic Maya
(250–800 CE) city-states (Halperin, 2011).
I have argued that these two organic materials became standards of value due
to their embeddedness in specific forms of social relations and have to be under-
stood in terms of the social practices that gave them meaning for specific groups of
people (Joyce, 2000). Cotton cloth played a particularly important role throughout its
history as a concentrated index of work, sometimes but not always very skilled work,
undertaken by groups of people who lived together and formed what archaeologists
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 43

recognize as households. Cacao drinks, required for marriage alliances (Gillespie

& Joyce, 1997), were used in transactions between groups of humans and super-
natural beings, as a ritually powerful substance equated with the animating force
of organic beings (Meskell & Joyce, 2003: 139–140). Even other media of value
that don’t immediately seem unusual, such as beads made from greenstone (jade),
attained their value as a consequence of their pragmatic use in social relations. Jade
beads were a store of wealth that was deployed in marriage alliance, probably in
part due to their long history of use in accounting for harvest and for counting in
divinatory practices (Freidel et al., 2017; Gillespie & Joyce, 1997). What cloth and
cacao shared, beyond their status as perishable organic materials, was that in the
societies where they constituted standards of value, their processing and conversion
into valuable forms was undertaken by individuals who were gendered female, and
their value was thus intertwined with the constitution of gender difference.

Cloth

The special role of cotton cloth as tribute payment has been recognized for as
long as scholars have developed arguments about “the Mesoamerican economy”.
In sixteenth-century Mexico, Spanish administrators authorized the production of
a register of tribute payments owed to the Mexica (or Aztec) empire centred in
Tenochtitlan which they sought to continue to administer (Berdan & Anawalt, 1992).
Entry after entry in this book detailed tribute paid in specific numbers of mantas,
lengths of cloth woven on backstrap looms. Some towns were listed as providing
more elaborate cloth, ornamented through additional techniques such as resist dyeing
(Anawalt, 1981). While credited as payments from the town, all of this cloth—simple
plain weave or complex—was the product of women’s work, carried out within the
houses and courtyards of residences.
Nor was the importance of cloth, and its implication of demands on women’s
labour, unique to the late conquest empire created by the Mexica. Images and texts
from the city-states of Maya people, occupied five centuries or more earlier in
Guatemala, also identified cloth as a major tribute good, in this case, rendered to
the ruler of a city-state by lords of subordinate towns (Baron, 2018a; Halperin, 2008,
2011).
While the cloth produced generally does not survive in the tropical environment,
archaeological analyses examine a database parallel to the historical information
derived from texts about the Mexica and inscriptions recorded by the Maya. Tools
for spinning and weaving cloth formed part of excavated assemblages in late Mexican
sites (Overholtzer, 2015), those of many Classic Maya city-states (Ardren et al., 2010;
Halperin, 2008; Hendon, 1997, 1999), and in other areas of Mesoamerica such as
Oaxaca where the textual record has not yet been completely deciphered (King, 2011;
McCafferty & McCafferty, 2000). Spindle whorls, battens, and weaving picks were
and continue to be recorded when archaeologists in the region carry out excavations
of the small-scale settings of everyday face-to-face life, house compounds.
44 R. A. Joyce

Yet such items are not found everywhere, and not everywhere in the same abun-
dance or with the same degree of elaboration. In the Maya area, secondary industries
produced enhanced tools discarded preferentially around the houses of the apparent
ruling and noble families (Hendon, 1997, 1999). In Oaxaca, weaving tools made of
precious materials, effigies too delicate to be used, were placed in major family tombs
(McCafferty & McCafferty, 1994). These carefully crafted tools do not simply place
production in a “domestic sphere”. They show that cloth production was particularly
important to households of the wealthy and powerful. Through the identification of
considerable investment in secondary industries to provide tools to these spinners
and weavers, archaeological assemblages underline the social importance of cloth
making.
Two ways of thinking about these material patterns have emerged in recent schol-
arship. On one side we see common sense claims that women’s work was appropri-
ated by men—men of their families, men of the state, men of the empire—without
any credit remaining for the crafting women. In this view, strongly influenced by
anthropological naturalization of sex-based hierarchies, women became a kind of
captive force working against their will only to lose the alienable products of their
labour. At first glance, this interpretation seemed consistent with early colonial data
showing how demands for cloth increased, as village-level cloth tribute levels did not
decline in parallel with the loss of population that followed the violence of Spanish
campaigns of colonization. Key work by feminist archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel,
however, identified changes in spinning technology that she argued accompanied
decreasing concern about the quality of cloth after the Spanish took over admin-
istration (Brumfiel, 1996, 1997). The corollary is the realization that prior to the
change to the European tribute system, even when the Mexica conquered and incor-
porated subject towns, the production of cloth remained a practice requiring skill
and knowledge, what Kohler and his colleagues (Kohler et al., 2017) call embodied
wealth.
Even for the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, who incorporated vast numbers of towns
and villages in an extractive state, there are implications of tribute in cloth that go
beyond its potential to be accumulated and trafficked in a marketplace. The tribute-
owing unit was not an individual, but a community. While cloth extracted from
these towns became anonymous in the markets of Tenochtitlan, where the Mexica
nobility converted it to other goods, in the towns where the work of cloth production
took place, weaving and spinning would have been visibly associated with known
persons, potentially recognized for their skill and expertise—what anthropologist
Julia Hendon (2006) describes as their craft knowledge, a form of embodied wealth
that is inherently inalienable at the scale of face-to-face society.
In texts Spanish-trained clerics recorded using the European alphabet to transcribe
the indigenous Nahuatl language, spinning and weaving are characterized as activi-
ties valued in part because they are how the subjective skill and personality of women
are formed (McCafferty & McCafferty, 1996). The specific texts we have come from
informants who were part of the ruling nobility and merchant group. They charac-
terize the epitome of womanhood for these classes or segments of society, the “good
woman”, as skilled craft producers. This emphasis is echoed in the vocabulary for
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 45

special tribute cloth types recorded in works produced for the new Spanish admin-
istration that incorporate terms for the specialized techniques that some, but not all,
textile producers knew (Berdan & Anawalt, 1992). They receive material inflection
through the production for some crafters of highly ornamented tools, through the
skilled craftwork of others. The distribution of spinning and weaving tools around
the houses of wealthy and politically powerful Classic Maya families has similar
implications.
I suggest that we need to consider the likelihood that tribute in cloth was more than
simply a way for ancient states in this region to accumulate goods that they would
then exchange in the marketplace for capital. Cloth was substantively connected to
groups of women who spun and wove, and through them to other people of the
community who provided the cultivated cotton and produced the tools with which it
was worked. Cloth assembled the people and things that constituted a specific place.
The literal emplacement of the backstrap loom—attached normatively to a support
beam of the house structure—performatively connected the cloth produced with the
people who made a place, a world, in the towns that sent cloth to the cities.

Cacao

The centrality of social relations to the value of cloth in these societies, while some-
times minimized, has been more broadly recognized than the importance of social
relations to the second standard of value to which I now want to turn, before assessing
what this case study can tell us about the contemporary world and the way archae-
ological models of economy can serve us today. Where cloth is understood as a
specialized currency that circulated as a sign of hierarchy in political relations, cacao
has at times been characterized as a generalized currency (Millon, 1955; Baron,
2018b). Yet nothing about the selection of this organic material as a standard of
value, or its persistence in use as a valuable material for thousands of years, suggests
that it was understood as a simple medium of exchange.
Cacao seeds are derived from plants of the genus Theobroma cacao and the less-
prized Theobroma bicolor. Both appear to be species introduced from further south,
although of great antiquity in the region, with residues detected in pottery vessels
discarded before 1000 BCE excavated in multiple areas (Powis et al., 2011; Joyce &
Henderson, 2010). Residues of chemicals diagnostic of Theobroma cacao remained
in vessels I excavated in Honduras dating to ca. 1150 BCE, whose distinctive forms
suggest the beverage being stored was alcoholic (Joyce & Henderson, 2010). Archae-
ologists working on assemblages from slightly later (around 700 BCE) in Mexico’s
Gulf Coast also identified evidence of alcohol brewing combined with the chemical
diagnostic of cacao, theobromine (Seinfeld, 2007). After this, vessels with traces of
cacao residues assume shapes associated with the serving of non-alcoholic cacao,
frothed just before presentation (Powis et al., 2002).
Based on the forms and contexts of the earliest vessels with traces of cacao, and the
culinary chemistry that transforms raw cacao seeds into dried cacao beans through
46 R. A. Joyce

a necessary stage of fermentation, I have argued that cacao was probably originally
exploited as part of a suite of plants converted into alcoholic beverages used in
hospitality by groups at the scale of a household (Joyce & Henderson, 2007). The
serving of these beverages employed well-crafted ceramic vessels, many mimicking
gourd containers. In Mexico, scholars working at the site of Paso de la Amada,
another area with early use of cacao, suggest the earliest fired clay containers there
were inspired by the desire to socially mark serving in drinking events at a similar
scale (Clark & Gosser, 1995).
The use of cacao as a measure of value, like the value of cloth, rests on its social
significance in activities in which women were key participants. Manuscripts created
by the Mixtec people of Oaxaca in the last few centuries before colonization portray
marital alliances between noble families through images of the couple presenting jars
of foaming cacao, often ornamented with signs of additions such as flowers (Jansen,
1992). The addition of ground cacao seeds to fermented cacao liquid ultimately
resulted in the creation of non-alcoholic versions of cacao drinks. The preparation of a
variety of cacao beverages, including the addition of other condiments (chile, vanilla,
fruit pits, and flowers) is reflected in Classic Maya inscriptions and colonial texts
as well as in Mixtec images (Gillespie & de MacVean, 2002; Beliaev et al., 2010).
These complex procedures of preparation, and particularly the fresh preparation of
seasoned cacao beverages at the point of serving, would have allowed the preparer to
receive (some of) the social credit for the hospitality in which these beverages were
offered, the moment recorded in Mixtec codices.
Today, cacao maintains associations of hospitable provisioning, including when
it is offered to deities in contemporary ceremonies like the compostura or earth-
offerings of the Lenca of Honduras. Contemporary and historic Lenca sources specif-
ically associate the offering of cacao beverages as significant in restoring health to
the land (Sheptak, 2013). An association between cacao as a kind of animating liquid
of the organic world of plants, and blood as the animating liquid of the organic world
of animals, including humans, binds these apparently disparate practices together
(Meskell & Joyce, 2003: 139–140).
Ignoring these associations of cacao seeds in order to treat them as a neutral
measure of value is motivated more by the belief of archaeologists that a great
empire like that of the Mexica must have had something equivalent to coinage, than
by serious consideration of indigenous sources. Texts from the sixteenth century
written in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, note that cacao was restricted to
consumption either in ceremony or, more generally, by the members of the most
exclusive social group, who were treated in many ways as divine beings.

Discussion

To help us conceptualize the Mesoamerican materials, we might turn to a third

contemporary synthetic deep history of the domain archaeologists designate as “the
economy”, in particular, to think about what these data tell us about how women’s
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 47

activities were recognized (or not) as economic: David Graeber’s book Debt: The
First 5,000 Years. Graeber offers a much more dynamic, and explicitly revisionist
view of the same millennia as Scott, often dealing with the same places. In contrast
to Against the Grain, the index for Debt includes a dense cluster of key terms relating
to women, with a great deal of historical specificity. The discussion of patriarchal
hierarchy (Graeber, 2014: 178–179) is particularly significant, as it occurs as part
of a reading of changes in the Mesopotamian world from the time of the Sume-
rians—when, Graeber (2014: 178) writes, “women are everywhere”, as “doctors,
merchants, scribes, and public officials… generally free to take part in all aspects of
public life”. Graeber identifies the need to finance wars as a driving force behind the
commodification of labouring bodies that, over the next 1000 years of his narrative,
reduces women’s prominence and scope of action. It is not just an effect of particular
features of female bodies that leads to this development. As families needed funds
for taxation, the bodies of family members became sources of security for loans,
and ultimately, were transactable directly through sale into slavery (Graeber, 2014:
179–185). In this discussion, far from a unified category of women and a second
unified category of men, we see cross-cutting dimensions of age-based authority,
property ownership, and activity that distinguish among male and female persons.
What makes Graeber more successful at seeing women as complex actors is,
among other things, his critical project, which questions the way a certain set of
concepts about “the economy” have become taken for granted background terms.
His discussion of the language of debt and credit draws directly from classic works
of what were once described as “substantivist” anthropologies of the economy, such
as the different circulation of goods among the Tiv. Graeber (2014: 146–148) empha-
sizes the views of the Tiv themselves of the potential for what he calls a “human
economy” to slide into a market economy. This is the context that Graeber describes
in which people of various categories—including women—see their bodily integrity
commodified and the social value of their contributions erode. Graeber links the shift
from a human economy to a market economy to precisely the reduction of persons
to tokens that, in naturalized form, haunts the other deep histories I have discussed:
In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is
a unique nexus of relations with others. A woman may be a daughter, sister, lover, rival,
companion, mother, age-mate, and mentor to many different people in different ways. Each
relation is unique, even in a society in which they are sustained through the constant giving
back and forth of generic objects… In one sense, those objects make one who one is– a fact
illustrated by the way that objects used as social currencies are so often things otherwise
used to clothe or decorate the human body, that help make one who one is in the eyes of
others… to make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another,
for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from
that web of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and
subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. (Graeber, 2014: 158–159)

This perspective becomes a ground from which to re-examine how women’s partic-
ipation in activities recognized or unrecognized as “economic” by archaeologists
might contribute to contesting the naturalization of present-day reduction of people
to the value of their labouring bodies.
48 R. A. Joyce

Separate Spheres? Rethinking the Archaeological Economy

Graeber begins his work on debt from the grounding of his previous anthropolog-
ical reconsideration of value (Graeber, 2001). For Marxist feminists in the 1970s and
1980s, the question of women’s unwaged work was also a question of value—specif-
ically, whether in capitalist economies, this work had any value, and if so, what kind.
Most often, the first generation of these writers concluded that what they then called
housework was properly excluded from consideration of labour value (Kaluzynska,
1980). Subsequent scholars harshly criticized this as naturalizing not just a specific
sexualized position of work, but one that was inherently heterosexist in its imagina-
tion of transcultural family life. Feminists who responded critically to these initial
formulations, including Nona Glazer-Malbin (1976), Dorothy Roberts (1997), and
Dorothy E. Smith (1987), sought to rework Marxist formulations to broaden under-
standings of value so that work in unwaged, everyday settings was understood to be
productive of value.
This research has had important impacts on broader economic practice and even
economic theory. Commenting on the exclusion of much of the work women do from
contemporary measures of “the economy” for the World Economic Forum, Diane
Coyle (2016) pointed to pioneering feminist writing such as Marilyn Waring’s If
Women Counted (1988) that called attention to the effects of not seeing this work as
valuable. Citing mainstream studies, Coyle (2016) writes:
In a well known alternative to GDP proposed in 1972 by William Nordhaus and James Tobin,
the “Measure of Economic Welfare” (MEW), their estimate for the amount and value of
“non-market production” in the mid-1960s was equivalent to about 40% of conventionally
measured economic output economy… In a 2011 study, the OECD concluded that home
production would add between 20% and 50% to the GDP of its member countries. The US
Bureau of Economic Analysis said it would have added 26% to US GDP in 2010.

As Rebecca Winter and Jasmina Brankovich (2016) summarized the issue, “by
presenting reproductive labour as not being ‘real work,’ women’s labour is devalued,
which allows capitalists to easily exploit it, while also perpetuating patriarchal social
relations which privilege paid work in the ‘public’ sphere when performed by men”.
Yet others have seen a danger in trying to treat work that women largely do
unpaid in domestic or residential settings in the same way that work in factories
is described. These critics call attention to the naturalizing of a specific way of
thinking about some practices as “the economy” that this perpetuates, an approach
that is profoundly embedded in precisely the kind of exploitation from which it seeks
to emancipate us. Feminist economists Geoff Schneider and Jean Shackelford, in a
conference paper originally called “Ten Principles of Feminist Economics” proposed
that “values enter into economic analysis at many different levels”, singling out such
things as the view that consumerism is a positive goal that underlies conventional
economics as a problem (Schneider & Shackelford, 2001). Their third principle for
feminist economics is that “the household is a locus of economic activity” of a kind
contrasted to the individualism that conventional economics identifies in work done
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 49

outside the household. This echoes Graeber’s (2014) contrast between the market
economy and a human economy.
In ancestral Mexico and Central America household compounds, the spaces
controlled by co-residential groups, served as the sites of primary production for
most goods, for the reproduction of skilled crafting, and for the transmission of
goods through hospitality. One way to think about this is to see the household as part
of the broader economic sphere, not a separate “domestic” space (Hendon, 1996). It is
not just maintenance work, or reproduction, that was located in these spaces, but the
primary productive activities on which states rested. To the extent that some kinds of
work were associated with specific social positions, including gender, these kinds of
work offered the potential for value to become identified with persons of those subject
positions. Cloth, whose exchange marked hierarchies between rulers and those they
ruled, began its economic life in gendered and highly visible productive relationships
in household compounds through which women demonstrated craft skill, which we
can view as a form of embodied wealth (Kohler et al., 2017). The abundant images
that have survived associating cloth production with feminine identities among the
Maya, the Mexica, and the Mixtec of Oaxaca, including supernatural or mythical
persons shown as weavers, created and reinforced broader visibility for the associa-
tion of feminine gender and textile value. The preparation of complex foods such as
cacao, bringing together a crop that was exotic to most places it was consumed with
other rare materials in spiced drinks whose performative preparation and serving by
female-gendered persons is portrayed in images in the same areas, created another
relationship between the production of economic value and gendered personhood.
I have tried in this paper to demonstrate that in ancestral Mexico and Central
America, theorizing an “economy” disembedded from social relations would distort
one of the most interesting things we know from historical texts and archaeological
research: that two of the primary standards of value and media for at least some
economic exchanges were perishable, organic materials transformed into media of
social relations through women’s work. The processes used to support the produc-
tion of cloth spawned additional crafting of tools that socially foregrounded spin-
ning and weaving and associated them with divine capacities of creation. Cloth
production represented the cumulation of efforts by a wide range of social actors,
drawing together residents of small agricultural settlements representing themselves
as autonomous within wider social relations.
These gendered associations of cloth production have to be seen as emerging
from social relations, not simply the appropriation of already alienable bodily labour
that is either inherent to female sex or naturally associated with it. Here, the deep
historical dimension available is helpful. Examining the associations of textile tools
in hundreds of burials in Tlatilco in Central Mexico, a village occupied between
1000 and 700 BCE, I noted that despite significant evidence for matrilineal kinship
joining members of long-lived houses, textile tools were not restricted to one sex
(Joyce, 2001a). So for this early period, I would argue that this value, and its role in
the human economy, had not yet emerged.
When textile production is represented as women’s work, as it was among the
later Classic and Postclassic Maya and Postclassic Mixtecs and Mexica, it clearly
50 R. A. Joyce

has more significance than simply being “what women do”: it is one of the ways
that some people assumed a gendered position, in social relations that involved
more than simply two genders corresponding to two natural sexes (Joyce, 2001b).
In the emergence of cacao seeds as a second tribute good and a measure of value,
again, it is social relations and meanings, not scarcity or inherent value, that made
cacao worthwhile. Cacao, served to visitors in small-scale encounters, presented to
supernatural beings responsible for the health of the earth, and consumed by human
leaders who claimed a divine-like standing, was the material for performances of
social provisioning and hospitality that marked food preparation as something more
than the natural role of (all) women.
These standards of value made it impossible for the people of these societies
to ignore the work done within what modern economics would label the domestic
sphere, work that anthropologists and economists alike tend to assign to women.
As feminist scholars of the contemporary economy have long noted, large areas of
economic activity by women are routinely excluded in modern analyses of market
economies. The exclusion of household maintenance work rests on a tacit distinction
between household labour (as intimate, domestic, and presumed to be ruled only by
naturalized relations of sex and age) and extra-domestic labour, seen as creating
value.
For the societies of ancient Central America, such a division simply did not exist.
A large part of the organization of agricultural labour built on household relations.
Specialist craft production in residential locales, by women and men, was critical
to broader social, political, and hence economic relations. In the period of greatest
socioeconomic stratification, in these societies, cloth produced by women working in
domestic spaces became one of the enduring standards of value, specifically impor-
tant in tribute payments that established and perpetuated political hierarchies. Cloth’s
use in this fashion cannot be disentangled from the social relations in which it was
embedded. Nor can the social relations which gave value to other key media used in
economic exchanges, for example, in the cultivation, preparation, and consumption
of cacao, the second standard of value. Even when market relations were transacted
in the marketplace of Tenochtitlan, using counts of cacao seeds as a means to estab-
lish equivalent value of other materials, they were embedded in a human economy
of moral relations (Joyce, 2001b: 140–143). In that human economy, dimensions of
difference, including gender, mattered. The matter of gender may actually account
for the most distinctive feature of the ancient Mesomerican economy, the selection
of perishable organic materials as standards of value. Beyond this unique aspect, this
case study suggests that when we examine ancient economies we need to explore the
social relations that gave value to materials in each historical situation with attention
to how value was produced, through what relations, by what kinds of actors. This
may make comparative measurement less feasible, but it will keep us from simply
projecting modern economic rationalisms on pasts which they poorly fit.
3 Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value … 51

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Chapter 4
“The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry
W. Pearson’s Contribution Revisited,
60 Years Later

Svend Hansen

Abstract In the influential volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires.
Economies in History and Theory edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg
und Harry W. Pearson (Chicago 1957) Pearson published his provocative article
“The Economy has No Surplus”. He rejected a mechanistic view of development
in which surplus was considered as the precondition of “complex” societies with
priests and a ruling class. He stressed the question of the preconditions of the surplus:
“There are always and everywhere potential surpluses available. What counts is the
institutional means for bringing them to life”. It provoked a number of statements
by Marvin Harris, Ernest Mandel, Maurice Godelier and others, which criticised
Pearson’s standpoint and insisted on the “evolutionary” view of surplus. In this
contribution, I will sketch this debate and discuss its relevance to the beginnings
of the Neolithic. The topicality of Harry W. Pearson’s essay lies in the fact that he
pointed out that the surplus product did not have a natural cause, but was organised
and that it came from a society that was already no longer egalitarian.

Introduction

The study of so-called “primitive societies” was from its very beginning in the eigh-
teenth century not only of academic character. Their description was also often used
as an implicit or explicit critique of the present society. Joseph-François Lafitau is
the most prominent early anthropologist to draw an alternative picture of primitive
societies.
In the nineteenth century John Lubbock (1874 [1865]), Edward Burnett Tylor
(1865), and Lewis Henry Morgan (1976 [1877]) were the most eminent anthro-
pologists, who described the indigenous peoples of the “New World” in terms of
evolutionary stages ranging from primitive to developed on four levels: social, intel-
lectual, juridical and religious. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied the works

S. Hansen (B)
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Eurasien-Abteilung, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: svend.hansen@dainst.de

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 55

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_4
56 S. Hansen

of the evolutionist researchers like James G. Frazer, John Lubbock, Lewis Henry
Morgan and others very intensively (Marx, 1976). Morgan’s book Ancient Society
(Morgan, 1976 [1877) was the basis for Engels’s Der Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigentums und des Staats (Engels, 1962 [1884]). Along with evolutionism, the
idea of societies, that had to go through various stages came up in Marxist theory. That
is, the classless society was only possible on the basis of a fully developed capitalist
society (Foucault, 1978: 48). Tied to this, however, was the assurance of progress and
the “principle” (Naturgesetz) of a development, which would overcome capitalism
(Salvadori, 2008). The other kind of progress was defined by the constant growth of
surplus or the control over nature (Naturbeherrschung), which was seen as the basis
for socialism (Honneth, 2015: 65–83). Morgan’s Ancient Society had been trans-
lated into the German language by Karl Kautsky, a well-known Social Democrat,
who later founded the USPD (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutsch-
lands), but returned to the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) already
in 1922 (Morgan, 1976 [1877]). The interest in early societies was not academic, yet
it was considered necessary for an understanding of the driving forces of history.
After the breakdown of evolutionism in anthropology as a consequence of
Bronislaw Malinowski’s groundbreaking field research on the Trobriand Islands
(Malinowski, 1922), evolutionist thinking became important again in the 1950s
(Steward, 1955). The models of the evolution of political systems sketched by
Morton Fried (1967) and Elman R. Service (1975) were widely accepted. Service
was undoubtedly the most precise and most influential anthropologist at that time
(Service, 1958, 1962; Sahlins & Service, 1960).
Since the 1970s the interest in the study of primitive societies has become very
widespread in western societies. It was an enormous awareness to find even larger
societies that were not structured in states (Sigrist, 1983). They served not as a
model, but as a kind of historical source that society could be organised other than
in states. Ethnology became a kind of Leitwissenschaft (leading field in science).
People wanted to understand not only the economic and political structures, but also
the wisdom, the spiritual potential of American and African tribes. Moreover, in the
1980s, the interest in the economy and the political evolution of primitive societies
grew enormously as well. At that time Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the original
affluent societies became very influential. The idea of “the original affluent society”
was first presented during the conference Man the Hunter in 1966, which had enor-
mous consequences for the anthropological study of hunter-gatherers in European
archaeology, too. Marshall Sahlins, invited as discussant, made his response to the
contributions of the conference participants (Sahlins, 1968, 1974).
He argued against the common belief that hunters enjoined continuous work just
to survive, “affording them neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the ‘leisure’
to ‘build culture’. Even so, for all his efforts, the hunter pulls the lowest grades in
thermodynamics-less energy/capita/year than any other mode of production. And in
treatises on economic development he is condemned to play the role of bad example:
the so-called ‘subsistence economy’. The traditional wisdom is always refractory.
One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically:
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 57

in fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society” (Sahlins,
1968).
The term “affluent society” was taken from Kenneth Galbraith, who had criti-
cised western capitalist societies for their social inequalities. Sahlins wrote: “The
familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appro-
priate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas
his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends
can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent goods’
become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises
somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and
technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a
people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty-with a low standard of living. That,
I think, describes the hunters” (Sahlins, 1968).
Sahlins really had in mind to argue against a very old misconception: “Probably it
was one of the first distinctly neolithic prejudices, an ideological appreciation of the
hunter’s capacity to exploit the earth’s resources most congenial to the historic task of
depriving him of the same. We must have inherited it with the seed of Jacob, which
‘spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north’, to the disadvantage
of Esau who was the elder son and cunning hunter, but in a famous scene deprived
of his birthright. Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not
be laid to neolithic ethnocentrism, however. Bourgeois ethnocentrism will do as
well. The existing business economy, at every turn an ideological trap from which
anthropological economics must escape, will promote the same dim conclusions
about the hunting life” (Sahlins, 1974: 3).
In the meanwhile Sahlins’ remarks about the hunter-gatherer society belong to
the basic knowledge of cultural discourses: “A good case can be made that hunters
and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food
quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the
daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society” (Sahlins, 1974:
14).
In his last book “The Western Illusion of Human Nature” again the lifestyle of
small-scale societies is emphasised. It is a splendid essay about the ancient sources of
the Hobbesian worldview of a presocial and antisocial human nature. According to
Sahlins, western society has been built upon a perverse and mistaken idea of human
nature. By contrast, the truly universal character of human sociality is expressed in
symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another:
they live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths (Sahlins, 2008).
Sahlins’ point is a critique of modern society: “Above all, what about the world
today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night.
In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of
hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, starvation
is an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases
relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole
point” (Sahlins, 1974: 23).
58 S. Hansen

So, Sahlins pinpointed that “Ethnologists and archaeologists have become

neolithic revolutionaries, and in their enthusiasm for the Revolution spared nothing
denouncing the Old (Stone Age) Regime” (Sahlins, 1974: 5). In line with this
notion, recent books describe the historical step from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer
to Neolithic economies with a certain lack of understanding of why people stepped
from the Palaeolithic paradise of much leisure and less work into the Neolithic
hell of hard work and unhealthy food (Hariri, 2014; Meller, 2015; Scott, 2017).
Claude Lévi-Strauss also saw the negative consequences of Neolithic accomplish-
ments (Lévi-Strauss, 2013: 51–69). Indeed, sedentism and basic innovations such as
stock-raising and agriculture fundamentally changed the way of life of human beings,
who had lived for thousands of years as gatherers and hunters. V. Gordon Childe,
who first coined the term “Neolithic Revolution” (Childe, 1936), would have never
criticised the peoples of the tenth and ninth millennia BC, for having tried to survive
in what seemed the best way. Childe was unambiguous in his view that hunger and
inequalities in the modern world should be abolished by modern societies.
Sahlins’ idea of the real “affluent society” became a standard in cultural anthro-
pology and also in archaeology. Critical contributions are rare (Bird-David, 1992;
Rowley-Conwy, 2001). Nonetheless, the high infant mortality, which does not fit with
an affluent society, has been emphasised. The observation of the high proportion of
“leisure time” in Kung society in Namibia has been explained by the necessity to
stay in the shade when temperatures are very high (Kaplan, 2000: 315). It seems that
Sahlins’ affluent society is so successful in anthropology because it is not considered
that their affluence is bound to their “Zen strategy”.
As recent publications indicate, there seems to be a reawakened interest in these
themes (Morehart & De Lucia, 2015; Bogaard, 2017). David Graeber (2011) also
combined ethnological reflections with a kind of political activism. Possibly respon-
sible for this reawakened interest is the present-day feeling of insecurity, brought
about by globalisation with its social and psychic upheavals and by digitalisation
together with rapid changes in so many spheres of life and work (Jullien, 2017).

Economy as Instituted Process and Harry Pearson

Karl Polanyi had a different focus. His starting point was the Age of Enlightenment
and the development of concepts of economy and market: Hobbes, Locke, Smith and
Marx. His writings were ambitious, towards understanding the complete tradition of
western philosophy and social theory, and challenging for the reader to follow his
intellectual brilliance.
Polanyi was born in Vienna and already in his youth he was part of the leftish and
intellectual life in Budapest, where he started to study law and philosophy (Dale,
2016). Also his family background can be described as extraordinary. It suffices only
to mention his brother Michael Polanyi, who was an excellent chemist and later a
well-known philosopher. Karl Polanyi had to leave Austria in 1935 for London. Later
he was able to move to the United States where he became Professor at Columbia
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 59

University (1947–1953). His wife, however, a member of the Communist party, did
not receive an entrance visa into the United States. For this reason, they moved
to Canada. Throughout his whole adult life Polanyi was politically torn between his
wife, an active communist, and his liberal brother Michael.
Now in the Anthropocene epoch (Renn & Scherer, 2015), what Polanyi wrote in
1947 sounds very familiar: “The present condition of man can be described in simple
terms. The Industrial Revolution, some 150 years ago, introduced a civilization of
a technological type. Mankind may not survive the departure; the machine may yet
destroy man; no-one is able to gauge whether, in the long run, man and the machine
are compatible. But since industrial civilization cannot and will not be willingly
discarded, the task of adapting it to the requirements of human existence must be
solved, if mankind shall continue on earth. Such, in common sense terms, is the
bird’s eye view of our troubles” (Polanyi, 1947).
After retiring from his teaching position at age 67, Karl Polanyi received a
grant from the Ford Foundation to continue interdisciplinary research on “Economic
Aspects of Institutional Growth”. Together with Conrad Arensberg and with assis-
tance from Harry Pearson as executive secretary of the project, Karl Polanyi directed
the research of a group of younger scholars. The result was “Trade and Market in the
Early Empires” (1957), which includes Polanyi’s seminal paper on “The Economy
as Instituted Process”. In their introduction to the volume, they argue against the
generality of a market system and the claim of formal economics to historically
universal applicability. The substantivist analysis has to penetrate the maze of social
relationships, in which economy was embedded. “This is the task of what we will
here call institutional analysis”.
One of the basic premises of economic anthropology from its very beginnings
onwards was, that surplus production was the prerequisite for development in society,
the formation of a priest caste and a ruling class. Melville J. Herskovits, one of the
leading ethnologists at that time, noted: “Whatever the case, the almost universal
inequities which seem to mark the distribution of surplus economic goods is striking.
This surplus wealth, it is apparent, goes to two groups, those who govern, and those
who command techniques for placating and manipulating the supernatural forces of
the universe” (Herskovitz, 1952: 414). This apparent matter-of-fact was questioned
in the article by Harry W. Pearson, “The Economy has no Surplus. Critique of a
Theory of Development” (1957).
Harry Waldemar Pearson was a longtime collaborator of Karl Polanyi. I tried
to find out some biographical details about him, but was not very successful. Even
in the Polanyi archive, where I asked for more information, there is no biograph-
ical material. In the archive, one can only find a manuscript by Pearson entitled “The
Transformation Economic Society”, which is an attempt to find out about an intellec-
tual crisis after the death of Polanyi and the edition of Karl Polanyi’s The Livelihood
of Man. Studies in Social Discontinuity in 1977.
H.W. Pearson died in 1998. In an obituary, which I received from the Polanyi
Archive, Walter C. Neal described Pearson as “a dear friend to many of the older
members, a guide and inspiration to us all, and the mainstay of the group of scholars
who gathered around Polanyi in the 1950s”. Some biographical details are in the
60 S. Hansen

following: “Harry earned his BA at Lawrence College in 1943, served in the U.S.
Army in Egypt during the Second World War, and then became a union organizer
in Arkansas. In 1947 he entered the graduate program in Economics at Columbia
University and shortly became a great admirer of Karl Polanyi and his work. From
1953 through 1958 he served as secretary, one might better say secretary-general, of
the post-graduate seminar and subsequent projects originated by Polanyi. In addition
to the regular chores of the position he was advisor to us all on innumerable matters.
He bore the major share of the editing of Trade and Market in the Early Empires ….
During these years he taught at Adelphi College, becoming Chair of the Economics
Faculty and, as Acting President during 1964–1965, saw the College through some
difficult times. During the 1970s Harry edited Polanyi’s previously unpublished notes
and lectures from the 1940s and 1950s, publishing them as The Livelihood of Man (by
Karl Polanyi, Harry W. Pearson, editor. New York, San Francisco, London: Academic
Press, 1977). After his retirement in 1983, he moved to Virginia”.
In his article of 1957, Pearson first drew attention to the posit, that surplus would
be a key for evolutionary change: “When employed as the key to evolutionary change,
the surplus theorem has two essential parts. There is first the very concept of such a
surplus. It is taken to represent that quantity of material resources which exists over
and above the subsistence requirements of the society in question. Such surpluses
are supposed to appear with advancing technology and productivity, and serve to
distinguish one level of social and economic organization from another. The second
part of the surplus theorem is the expectation that the surplus has an enabling effect,
which allows typical social and economic developments of prime importance to take
place. Trade and markets, money, cities, differentiation into social classes, indeed
civilization itself, are thus said to follow upon the emergence of a surplus” (Pearson,
1957: 321).
Pearson identified this position in the works of Melville J. Herskovits, V. Gordon
Childe, Leslie White and others (Pearson, 1957: 321). Herskovitz, for example,
argued in his very influential book Economic Anthropology for a connection between
population size and surplus: “It is to be recalled that the societies having the simplest
economies, crudest technologies, and surpluses either nonexistent or so slight as to
be of little significance, also have the smallest populations. On the other hand, it is
evident that among the most populous nonliterate peoples, the surplus is large enough
to enable these groups to support considerable numbers of persons not engaged in
the production of subsistence goods. This point is the more striking if the literate
historic cultures are included, since these comprise both greater populations, greater
economic surpluses, and larger leisure classes than are found elsewhere” (Herskovitz,
1952: 413; for a broader discussion, cf. Heath Pearson, 2010).
With so many effects of surplus, for Pearson, citing Herskowitz, the question
remains: “Just why the surplus is produced remains obscure” (Pearson, 1957: 322).
Pearson viewed the basic needs of humans not as biological, but rather as a social
construct. Therefore, he maintained that there is no absolute surplus, that is, no
“absolute measure”. Instead, surplus would be definable only by the entirety of the
needs of a society. Relative surplus would then be present, when food for a specific
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 61

feast would be produced and stored. These relative surpluses are initiated by the
society in question.
Pearson identified Friedrich Engels as having introduced the surplus concept into
anthropology: Engels: “In the middle stage of barbarism we already find among the
pastoral peoples a possession in the form of cattle which, once the herd has attained a
certain size, regularly produces a surplus over and above the tribe’s own requirements,
leading to a division of labor between pastoral peoples and backward tribes without
herds, and hence to the existence of two different levels of production side by side with
one another and the conditions necessary for regular exchange. The upper stage of
barbarism brings us the further division of labor between agriculture and handicrafts,
hence the production of a continually increasing portion of the products of labor
directly for exchange, so that exchange between individual producers assumes the
importance of a vital social function” (Engels, 1962 [1884]).
Pearson furthermore discussed the origin of the concept “surplus” as it was typical
for Polanyi’s school in historical depth and identified it in the works of the French
Physiocrats in the Age of Enlightenment. Pearson found the idea of an absolute (that
is, natural) surplus inadequate, and saw in that idea a typical figure of thought of
economic liberalism, which he ascribed to John Locke. But this line of thought will
not be pursued here in detail.
Surplus is, as the plausible theory goes, not natural, and thus must be viewed as
a relative surplus within the frame of “definitive institutional requirements for the
creation of relative surpluses”. For example, it needs a redistributive system, in which
fees for the redistribution of goods can be charged. “One of the most common of all
means of surplus accumulation has been the power of arms to plunder and secure
booty” (Pearson, 1957: 336). The elite exchange of prestigious goods would be a
motor for mobilising surpluses. In short, “There are always and everywhere potential
surpluses available. What counts is the institutional means for bringing them to life”
(Pearson, 1957: 339).
Pearson’s contributions have consequences for three fields: first, a theory of
development/evolution as part of Marxian theory; second, the re-evaluation of the
Neolithic; and third, possible consequences for consideration of the technical world.

Marx and Surplus

Marx argued that surplus value arises through the non-paid working time of workers;
the surplus value is included in the surplus product. Pearson remarked: “Marx was
perhaps the first to emphasize the institutional origin of relative surpluses in a market
economy by focusing on the contractual relationship between worker and capitalist”
(Pearson, 1957: 340, note 33). However, it is advisable to reserve the terms “surplus”
(Mehrprodukt) for the Stone Age Economics (Sahlins, 1974), or other precapitalistic
formations and—oppositely—the terms “surplus value” for commodity production
which requires labour (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 189–191). So it would be better to speak of
62 S. Hansen

the appropriation of surplus which would name the precapitalist form of exploitation,
and surplus value which is based on labour and exchange.
Nonetheless, Marx never challenged the production of surplus produce. Why?
Because only the enormous wealth of the capitalist world would make people free
“to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner” (Marx & Engels, 1958 [1845–1846]: 33). Marx is the complete opposite of
the Zen road mentioned by Sahlins.
In reply to Pearson’s article, Marvin Harris emphasised oppositely the importance
of the existence of the surplus, which he attached to the measurable calorie require-
ment of humans (Harris, 1959). Everything that exceeded this was surplus. With this
statement, Harris defended a manner of natural mechanism in social differentiation
and development, which excluded the question of the motor of surplus production.
George Dalton replied that surplus “is used as a deus ex machina which allegedly
explains complex social structure or some unobserved socio-economic development”
(Dalton, 1960: 485).
Ernest Mandel argued in the same direction; he viewed the concept of social
excess products as essential for the Marxian analysis of economics (Mandel, 1968:
45–49, 2002). Mandel especially turned against the assumption of a constant supply
of food. Only with the Neolithic Revolution did people become able to control their
daily nourishment. Mandel explicitly refers to a “permanent surplus” as a result
of the Neolithic Revolution (Mandel, 1968: 30). He wrote: “Every increase in the
productivity of labour beyond this low point makes a small surplus possible; and
once there is a surplus of products, once man’s two hands can produce more than is
needed for his own subsistence, then the conditions have been set for a struggle over
how this surplus will be shared”. One gets the impression that surplus production is
comparable to learning to walk: Every day one step more.
Although he welcomed Pearson’s differentiations, Maurice Godelier, too,
remained firm about the relevance of the concept of surplus, by referring to it as
a necessary condition for the future in capitalistic times (Godelier, 1972: 317–319).
Neither Mandel nor Godelier succeeded in freeing their form of Marxian economic
theory from the evolutionist trap.

Surplus in the Neolithic

Nowadays, Neolithic society has become a synonym for the simple beginnings of
farm life. It is thought of as a time in which people lived together with their animals,
still in harmony with nature. The Neolithic is also regarded by many as the time of
matriarchy and the worship of a mother goddess (Gimbutas, 1995). Also, in the neo-
evolutionist scheme for the development of society, early farmers formed egalitarian
societies that did not have a marked hierarchical structure. The elder men had the say;
they were eventually replaced by younger men who were in charge. The division of
labour in Neolithic settlements was not noticeably distinct: “The economic basis of
Neolithic society was farming and stock-raising. The division of labour was relatively
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 63

low, whereby age and even more so gender were determinant for the scope and kind
of activities to be carried out. The basic economic unit comprised autonomous farm-
steads, likely organised on a kinship basis” (Veit, 1996: 201). And correspondingly,
Neolithic households are described as autonomous units, which produced more or
less everything on their own; very little exchange took place, above all, for desired
articles from afar or prestigious goods.
But strong asymmetries in power and wealth did obviously occur, already in the
fifth millennium BC, as is clearly demonstrated by the cemetery in Varna on the
Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea. Many graves in Varna held only a few grave gifts
or none at all, whereas some burials, by contrast, were lavishly furnished with goods,
there among objects made of copper and gold. A total of 1.5 kg of gold was placed
with the deceased in graves 4 and 43 each. According to available radiocarbon dates,
the graves in Varna cover a time span of at least 100 years (4550–4450 calBC), or
basing on more recent datings—up to 250 years (4650–4390 calBC) (Higham et al.,
2007: 174; Krauß et al., 2014: 385, fig. 12; Windler et al., 2013).
Jean-Paul Demoule (2007: 78–89) commented that the graves in Varna would
historically mark the beginning of social inequality. Colin Renfrew was the first
who explicitly emphasised that with the cemetery in Varna the limits of domestic
production had obviously been exceeded (Renfrew, 1986: 141–143). The duration of
the settlement in Pietrele in South Romania was likely about 300 years (4600–4300
calBC), and there the economic base of such lavish grave goods can be described as
a tributary system based on the division of labour (Hansen, 2018).
The more primitive picture of the Neolithic has been disrupted in the past three
decades. New excavations in settlements of the preceramic Neolithic in Eastern
Turkey and Northern Syria have revealed a hitherto unknown world of monumental
architecture and figural sculpture (Hauptmann & Schmidt, 2007). There the begin-
nings of a producing economy could be pushed back into the tenth millennium BC
through the “radiocarbon revolution”. Likewise, in the Southern Levant the primary
process of Neolithisation can be described for the first time through radiocarbon
dating.
Cultic houses built of stone in Nevalı Çori, larger than life-sized statues and stone
circles in Göbekli Tepe with pillars up to 5 m in height show that these were not
at all tentative beginnings. Instead the contexts strongly suggest that represented
here are organised processes, which demanded a considerable amount of labour. The
stone circles and the sculptures are visible surplus products which were only possible
because their producers were fed by people who produced more than was necessary
for biological survival. There is no doubt that Nevalı Çori and Göbekli Tepe are
not the only sites where large special buildings were erected and stone sculptures
produced. Further research will uncover similar sites, which are already identified.
These monumental buildings originated during a transitional time period, in which
the old lifestyle as hunter and gatherer declined and a new more sedentary life with
plant cultivation and later animal domestication arose. It was a deep-going crisis, in
which the hunted game disappeared and with that peoples’ basis of their traditional
life. It is hardly possible to understand Neolithisation in the paradigm of Marshal
Sahlins “affluent society”.
64 S. Hansen

It has become clear that the process of Neolithisation lasted much longer than hith-
erto thought in research. Nevalı Çori and Göbekli Tepe were not local developments,
but instead represent a regional phenomenon with interactions in communication
and exchange. It is quite unclear how labour was organised and how many people
were involved, but there are some good arguments that work was under the control
and direction of persons, who had the special protection of imagined supernatural
powers, powers which were perhaps as rendered in the large-size statue found in
Urfa (Hauptmann, 2003). All of this hardly offers a basis for considering the begin-
nings of the Neolithic period as an egalitarian organised process. The world of special
buildings and sculpture disappeared in the eighth millennium BC. A more egalitarian
model seems to have been the basis for the colonisation processes since the seventh
millennium BC, when the Neolithic way of life entered new geographical areas, until
it became established in central Europe in the first half of the sixth millennium BC.

Consequences for the Technical World

More than 20 years ago Jaret Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel posed
the question as to where the historical origins of present-day inequalities between
the continents should actually be sought (Diamond, 1999). His answer was: in
the Neolithic. Only in Eurasia were enough animals available to domesticate for
husbandry. This answer is not as clear as it might seem. On the one hand, it is true
that in Eurasia several species of mammals existed that could be domesticated, in
Australia by contrast—none. But we should not make the nature and the number of
domesticates responsible for the inequality in the modern world. It was a strict rule
of the founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim, to explain that which is social solely
with social facts and not with nature or religion.
Since then interest in the early history of techniques and knowledge has increased
noticeably (Hariri, 2014; Kaube, 2017; Renn & Hyman, 2012). But already V. Gordon
Childe (1958) and later Jack Goody (2010) viewed technological development as a
key to understanding global disparities. Childe spoke of a technological differentia.
Yet only later could this aspect in history be pursued, basing upon a solid chronology
and on a global scale. This became possible as a result of the radiocarbon revolution,
which provided a secure chronology. The end of the bloc division in 1989 made
it easier for research worldwide. In addition, numerous new methods in scientific
analyses throw light on the history of techniques (Smith et al., 2012). For example, the
identification of natural resources enables the reconstruction of trade and exchange
routes, which in turn throws light on ways of the transfer of knowledge. Thus, today
an early history of mankind can be written, in which technical developments can be
reconsidered adequately as preconditions and possibilities for economic, social and
political processes, even though large gaps still exist that must be filled.
The examination of technical and social innovations can supply new impulses to
the surplus-discussion of the Polanyi-School, and at the same time it gains important
insights. Concerned here is the question: what was the framework within which the
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 65

invention of technical devices and the development of techniques became possible. Or

to use the famous Polanyi phrase, how were innovations “embedded” in society. The
much-debated yet still unanswered question is whether innovative techniques arose
during times of crises, in which creative solutions were urgently needed, or whether
innovations were specially fostered by conditions of peace and intellectual freedom.
Are technical innovations the preconditions for or the result of the emergence of a
ruling class?
During the fourth millennium BC the world changed through a number of basic
innovations: the fully developed metallurgy for practical purposes, the development
of weapons which were in use for millennia in time, the wheel and the wagon, the
domestication of the horse and the woolly sheep (Hansen, 2016). Here we see the
foundations of a technological society which enabled class differentiation, states,
slavery and permanent war.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and his famous distinction of “cold” and “hot” societies can
help to converge to this observation. In his inaugural lecture at the College de France
he stated: “The so-called primitive societies, of course, exist in history; their past
is as old as ours, since it goes back to the origin of the species. Over thousands of
years they have undergone all sorts of transformations; they have known wars, migra-
tions, adventure. But they have specialized in ways that differ from those which we
have chosen. Perhaps they have, in certain respects, remained closer to very ancient
conditions of life, but this does not preclude the possibility that in other respects they
are farther from those conditions than we are. Although they exist in history, these
societies seem to have elaborated or retained a particular wisdom, which incites
them to resist desperately any structural modification, that would afford history a
point of entry into their lives. Those which have best protected their distinctive char-
acter appear to be societies predominantly concerned with preserving their existence.
The way in which they exploit the environment guarantees both a standard mode of
living and the conservation of natural resources (…) In short, these societies, which
we might define as ‘cold’ in that their internal environment neighbours at the zero of
historical temperature, are, through their limited total manpower and their mechan-
ical mode of functioning, distinguished from those defined as ‘hot’ societies, which
appeared in different parts of the world following the Neolithic revolution. In these
‘hot’ societies, differentiations between castes and classes are urged unceasingly in
order to extract social change and energy from them” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 121).
With this we are able to understand much better the crucial distinctions between
the technological, intellectual and mental developments in Eurasia and partly Africa,
on the one hand, and North America and Australia, on the other hand. The Euro-
Afroasian model of the Neolithic and its rapid dynamic development up to the emer-
gence of cities and states is unparalleled in the world. States and civilisations emerged
in South and Central America much later. In Eurasia the connection between tech-
nical innovations and social hierarchisation was much closer and flowed into cities
and states. The result of these developments was undoubtedly the permanent increase
in surplus production, interrupted only by diseases such as the plague or by major
wars.
66 S. Hansen

It enabled people to live today a much easier and healthy life than even 100 years
before (Serres, 2019). The minority of people in the world enjoy a carefree life and
the majority wants to have it. This represents a certain dilemma, because we all
understand that this way of life is responsible for ecological and social catastrophes.
Lévi-Strauss had only the social relations in mind, but not the ecological costs and
climate change, when he wrote in 1986: “Perhaps that revolution [he is referring to the
digital revolution, SH] allows us to glimpse the possibility of one day moving from a
civilization that inaugurated historical change, but only by reducing human beings to
the condition of machines, to a wiser civilization which would succeed—as we have
begun to do with robots—in transforming machines into humans. Then, when culture
had fully accepted the obligation to produce progress, society would be liberated from
a millennial curse that constrained it to subjugate human beings for progress’ sake.
Henceforth, history would come to pass on its own, and society, placed outside and
above history, could again enjoy the transparency and internal equilibrium by which
the least damaged of the so-called primitive societies attest that such things are not
incompatible with the human condition” (Lévi-Strauss, 2013: 74–76).

Conclusion

As is so often the case with influential theories and concepts, the slogan of the affluent
society, with which Marshal Sahlins described the hunter-gatherers communities,
was adopted only selectively. The other part, however, the Zen strategy of needless-
ness, was faded out. Thus the Neolithic Revolution became a power that destroyed
forever the seemingly paradisiacal, in reality very precarious life of hunter-gatherers.
The Neolithic period later became synonymous with the creation of the first surplus
product. The surplus product or, in capitalist society, surplus value production has
since been regarded as the prerequisite for a human future. Today, under the condi-
tions of global warming, not only the fair distribution of the surplus product but also
its sustainable production is on the agenda.
The topicality of Harry W. Pearson’s essay lies in the fact that he pointed out
that the surplus product did not have a natural cause, but was organised and that it
came from a society that was already no longer egalitarian. Pearson challenged the
common sense of surplus. The importance of his deliberations goes beyond simple
terminology for emphasising the mechanism of how surplus products came into being
in the first place. Pearson’s contribution stresses the point of the decision-making for
any surplus too far away to be something given by nature. His consideration touches
upon certain fields of the future. This is how surplus production could be embedded
in general public interest and welfare, on the one hand, and in the ecological necessity
to stop climate warming, pollution and species extinction, on the other hand.
In the controversy with Marvin Harris, Polanyi’s student George Dalton restated
the problem in the form of a question: “When the tantalizing question is raised – ‘How
did they get to be priests and rulers?’ – it is sometimes answered by saying that a food
surplus must have arisen; because if no food surplus arose in a pre-stratified society,
4 “The Economy Has No Surplus”: Harry W. Pearson’s Contribution … 67

the potential priests and rulers would have had to produce food for themselves and
hence could not have become priests and rulers” (Dalton, 1963: 389).
The question was why should a surplus have been produced in the first place
and how could this have happened “so simply”? The answer was, that this did not
simply happen; instead the surplus production was organised, and the origins for the
organisation should be sought where they hitherto have not been imagined, namely
in the egalitarian society.
Pearson and Dalton transferred a natural explanation into an institutional justifi-
cation for surplus, in that they attached it with political control over the economy,
for example, in a redistributive system. Dalton expressly noted that the assumption
that a surplus emerged naturally and would not derive from class division would be
an illusion: “It is not entirely apparent whether or not the anthropologist is aware
that his Robinson Crusoe-hypothetical societies, in which all were food producers,
perhaps, never existed” (Dalton, 1963: 394).

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Reinhard Jung and Stefanos Gimatzidis for their kind
invitation to this inspiring symposium. I would also like to thank Professor Marguerite Mendell,
Director of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy Montreal and Ana Gomez in the Karl
Polanyi archive for their support. Emily Schalk translated an earlier version of this contribution.

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Chapter 5
Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus
and Anatolia

Bleda S. Düring

Abstract In the Chalcolithic of Cyprus and Anatolia, we can document the emer-
gence of exchange networks that were centred on highly standardized craft products.
These exchange systems, organized around figurative items crafted from stone, set
the stage for the later development of long-distance exchange networks of ‘prestige
goods’ made from metals and gemstones of often distant provenance. This earliest
exchange of figurative stone objects, which occurred in egalitarian societies, remains
poorly investigated. Why were such objects considered desirable in the first place?
How can we understand the rise of the shared regimes of value that they objectify?
In this paper, I will present some first ideas to understand this problem in relation
to anthropological studies on value, and I will argue that the initial creation of value
was rooted in shared cultural repertoires of craftsmanship.

Introduction

When it comes to the study of economic systems of the past, archaeology faces
an important challenge. Along with history and anthropology, it constitutes one of
the few disciplines, that can provide data on societies whose economic systems
were based on radically different parameters. Yet, recent scholarship abounds with
studies suggesting that today’s economic principles were equally pertinent to the
deep past. Scholars such as Graeber (2011), Scott (2017) and Scheidel (2017) have
recently reconstructed Bronze Age Mesopotamian economies as being not dissim-
ilar to contemporary economic systems: having class societies, private property and
exploitation and enslavement of workers by elites and state institutions. Further, they
pushed the emergence of private property and competition over scarce resources
back into the Neolithic, a view that is also held by some colleagues in archaeology
(Mattison et al., 2016). In doing so, they not only legitimize modern economic and
social practices by suggesting that they are part and parcel of human history from

B. S. Düring (B)
Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: b.s.during@arch.leidenuniv.nl

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 71

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_5
72 B. S. Düring

the very beginning, but they also ignore the work of scholars who have studied these
ancient societies up close and argue that ancient states were extremely weak and
incapable of modern forms of exploitation (Richardson, 2012), and that there is no
evidence for persistent (intergenerational) social inequalities in many Neolithic and
Chalcolithic (that is pre-urban) societies (Price & Bar-Yosef, 2010; Hodder, 2014;
Kohler et al., 2018).
Thus, a reconsideration of the nature of ancient economies is a desideratum, and
the topic of the symposium at the origins of this volume was well chosen. However,
if one studies the archaeological discourse of ancient economies, there is remark-
ably little to work with. Up to the 1980s the polemical debates between formal-
ists and substantivists, initiated by Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, on the degree to
which exchange in the ancient world was or was not socially embedded, continued to
determine the discourse of eastern Mediterranean archaeology (Polanyi et al., 1957;
Finley, 1999; Warburton, 2011). The subsequent, and related, approach of distin-
guishing between inaliable objects and commodities, deriving from the seminal work
of Appadurai and Kopytoff (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986; Appadurai, 2013),
has been used mainly by Aegean archaeologists and has limited impact beyond
(Voutsaki, 1997; van Wijngaarden, 1999). In recent years, however, with the exclu-
sion of network analysis (Knappett et al., 2008; Ibáñez et al., 2016), relatively little
work on ancient exchanges and economies has taken place.
Remarkably, discussions on ancient economies have focused almost exclusively
on the nature of exchange systems, and more particularly, on how exchange was
organized in relation to society. The things that were exchanged and why these
things were exchanged has not been the focus of much research, and neither has their
production and consumption received much attention, although this situation has
started to change in recent years (Wilkinson, 2014; Massa & Palmisano, 2018). Thus,
we have arrived in the paradoxical situation that the very objects that were central
to exchange have often been regarded as epiphenomenal, and the study of ancient
economies has been largely bypassed by the new materialism that has transformed
so much of archaeology (Boivin, 2008). Here instead, I want to focus on what was
being exchanged, what type of material and technology went into its production, and
why these objects might have been considered worth pursuing. In other words: why
were these objects considered valuable?

Setting the Scene

In the middle of the third millennium BCE a remarkable development occurred

in the eastern Mediterranean, which could in effect be labelled the first globaliza-
tion episode in this region of the world (following earlier globalization episodes
in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf) (Frank & Thompson, 2005). Between about
2600 and 2200 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean witnessed the emergence of remark-
ably far-flung exchange networks, in which relatively modest places such as Troy
were obtaining exotic substances such as lapis lazuli or amber from distant regions
5 Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia 73

such as Afghanistan and the Baltic. Exquisitely crafted objects made from valuable
materials were used by elites to distinguish themselves from commoners. Whether
or not these elites were successful in their attempt to establish a class society at this
time is a matter of debate. Although much work remains to be done to understand
how economies worked in particular Early Bronze Age societies, the prestige goods
model (Frankenstein & Rowlands, 1978; Kristiansen, 1987; but see Kienlin, 2017)—
in which valuable objects, often made of exotic materials, were used by elites to
underline their aspirations—has been more or less universally accepted (Bachhuber,
2009, 2015a).
Around the same time as the floruit of the EBA trade networks, ca. 2400 BCE,
we can date the so-called ‘Philia’ horizon in Cyprus—which is often interpreted
as an Anatolian colonization of groups bringing a distinctly Anatolian set of prac-
tices to the island, including ploughing, textile industries and rectangular buildings.
Many scholars argue that these groups came to exploit Cypriote copper ores (Webb
& Frankel, 2007, 2011; Bachhuber, 2015b). If we accept this hypothesis, this devel-
opment further underlines the importance of trade, especially that in metals, in the
mid-third millennium BCE.
The question how this interconnected, perhaps even globalized, world came into
being has not been addressed much, as if the co-development of elites, crafted
objects made from valuable materials and long-distance trade networks is self-
evident and does not require further scrutiny. Some scholars have argued for a World
Systems approach, in which these developments were triggered by a more developed
Mesopotamian core (e.g. Bachhuber, 2015a: 150–151). This argument is problematic,
however, as there is no substantial evidence that can be marshalled to demonstrate
that a site like Troy was a Mesopotamian satellite of sorts. By contrast, there is much
evidence that the emergence of trade networks, metallurgy and elites, are to be under-
stood primarily as indigenous developments (see Stein, 2005 for a similar critique of
Upper Mesopotamia as a World Systems dependency in the Uruk period). Of course,
these local developments were connected to broader networks, and Anatolian soci-
eties did appropriate existing technologies and ideas from Mesopotamia (Rahmstorf,
2006), but this should not be construed as representing a relation of dominance.
Exchange networks have a long and dynamic history in the ancient Eastern
Mediterranean. Well known, for example, are Neolithic exchange networks through
which obsidian ended up as far as 2000 km away from its source of origin. The
reconstruction of these obsidian exchange networks and modelling the mechanisms
of exchange, has been one of the great success stories of archaeology (Düring,
2014; Ibáñez et al., 2016). Remarkably, these obsidian exchange networks can be
documented alongside entrenched cultural differences between exchanging groups,
for example, between central Anatolia and upper Mesopotamia. At the obsidian
processing site of Kaletepe we even find Levantine knapping technologies (navi-
form cores), which are completely absent otherwise in Asia Minor, suggesting a
production specifically for export (Binder & Balkan-Atlı, 2001). Subsequently, in
the Later Neolithic and Chalcolithic (sixth and fifth millennia BCE) we see much
less evidence for exchange networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as an
increasing fragmentation of cultural traditions in Asia Minor and Cyprus (but a very
74 B. S. Düring

different trajectory occurs in Mesopotamia, with the rise of the Halaf and the Ubaid)
(Düring, 2013).
It is only in the Chalcolithic that we see the re-emergence of exchange networks
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Interestingly, we have evidence for what I think are the
earliest traded craft objects: stone figurative objects that circulated in Chalcolithic
Anatolia and Cyprus. In Anatolia, the earliest objects of this type are the so-called
Kilia figurines, dated to the mid-fifth millennium BCE. On Cyprus, they take form
of cruciform figurines, and date to the second half of the fourth millennium BCE.
What these object types have in common is that they do not appear to be ‘useful’,
and one wonders why these objects were exchanged by prehistoric people. Why and
how were they of value to people?

The Kilia Case

I will focus first on the site of Kulaksizlar located in western Turkey, where a marble
working workshop has been investigated by Turan Takaoğlu (2002, 2005, 2016,
2017; also Dinç, 1996) (Fig. 5.1).
Two types of marble objects were produced at this workshop: Kilia figurines and
pointed beakers with perforated handles. Kilia figurines depict a stylized humanoid,
most likely female, with a long neck, round sloping shoulders, arms folded upwards
in front of the chest and a lozenge-shaped lower body and legs, with incisions to

Fig. 5.1 Map of the northern part of the eastern Mediterranean showing the two main sites discussed
in this paper. Produced by the author
5 Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia 75

indicate the legs and the pubic triangle (Seeher, 1992). Whereas the bodies are flat,
the necks are cylindrical and the heads are much broader than the body and have
raised facial features. The beakers are conical in shape and have two vertical lugs
with piercings near the rim (Fig. 5.2).
Both the pointed marble beakers and the Kilia figurines have been found over
large areas. While there may have been other production centres besides Kulaksızlar,
the distribution of such artefacts does tell us something about prehistoric exchange
patterns and cultural preferences. Similar pointed marble beakers have been found on

Fig. 5.2 Kilia figurine currently at the Getty Museum (object 88.AA.122). Reproduced with
permission under CC-BY arrangement
76 B. S. Düring

the Aegean islands of Samos, Keos and Naxos; in the Troad, at Kumtepe and Beşik-
Sivritepe; at Demircihöyük in the Eşkişehir Region, at Çukuriçi Höyük in Aegean
Turkey and at Varna in western Bulgaria (Takaoğlu, 2002: 78–79; 2004: 3; Schwall,
2018: 243).
By contrast, Kilia figurines were found across western Anatolia, but seemingly
not in the Aegean: at sites in the Troad such as Beşik-Yassıtepe, Hanaytepe and Troy;
and in western Turkey, at Yortan, Alaağaç, Selendi, Gavurtepe and Aphrodisias. Kilia
figurines are mainly found at sites dating to the Middle Chalcolithic. The EBA Kilia
figurines, for example at Troy, are probably heirlooms (Seeher, 1992: 163; Takaoğlu,
2002: 80).
A large number of blanks, waste by-products, manufacture rejects and stone
working tools were found at Kulaksızlar. These constitute about 90% of the surface
assemblage at the site, with the remainder consisting of more ordinary domestic
artefacts (Takaoğlu, 2002: 72). The marble raw material for these stone vessels and
other rocks used in the manufacturing process such as gabbro, basalt and sandstone
were located within walking distance of Kulaksızlar. The stone vessels and figurines
were produced with a combination of hammering, drilling and grinding techniques.
Notably, the raw material used for the production of the pointed beakers and Kilia
figurines is present in many localities within the exchange networks.
I want to draw attention to two key aspects of these objects. First, they are objects
of skilled craft. The Kulaksızlar workshop was clearly pushing the limits of what
is possible in marble. The remarkable thing about both the pointed beakers and the
Kilia figurines is that they have features that are very difficult to produce in stone:
the beakers have perforated vertical lugs, and the figurines have round protruding
heads set on a narrow and fragile neck. It is likely, that the consumers of these
objects appreciated this aspect of craftsmanship. This is plausible given a pre-existing
tradition of stone artefacts in Asia Minor.
The production of stone bracelets has been documented at Late Neolithic and
Chalcolithic sites, such as Orman Fidanlığı and Kanlıtaş (Baysal et al., 2015), where
numerous blanks and broken fragments were found. Stone bracelets are found at
many late prehistoric sites in Asia Minor, such as Köşk Höyük, İkiztepe and Mersin-
Yumuktepe. The ubiquity of these artefacts meant that people were familiar with
producing stone artefacts and knew that they could easily break during production
and use. Undoubtedly, this knowledge fed into the appreciation of the pointed beakers
and the Kilia figurines. On another level, there is a rich tradition of figurine production
and consumption in Anatolian Prehistory, although none of the types can be regarded
as immediate predecessors of the Kilia figurines.
The second remarkable thing about the Kilia figurines is how standardized they
are. There are a few small details that differ from one object to the other, such as the
shape of the backward protrusion of the head, but overall they can be classified as
variations of a type (Lesure, 2017 talks of logos). This is a point I will return to later
in the discussion.
5 Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia 77

The Cruciform Case

In Cyprus, there is a tradition of cruciform stone figures that is completely unrelated

in its development (no Kilia figurines were found on Cyprus and no cruciforms
were found in Anatolia) (A Campo, 1994; Peltenburg & Webb, 2013; Lesure, 2017;
Crooks, 2018). They are predominantly made of picrolite, a type of stone of green
colour that is relatively soft and unique to Cyprus, occurring in seams in the Troodos
Mountains. Picrolite blocks and pebbles range in size from a few centimetres to
about 30 cm (maximum outlier). The smaller cruciforms are often pierced and show
evidence of having been strung on a necklace or armlet, while the larger objects may
have been stationary. Variations in ceramics and stone of cruciform figurines have
also been found (Fig. 5.3).
Like the Philia figurines, the cruciforms are characterized by a high degree of
stylistic standardization. All have outstretched arms, bent knees and parallel legs,

Fig. 5.3 Small pricolite figurine form the site of Chlorakas-Palloures (667_M1). Palloures
excavation archives, photo by Ian J. Cohn
78 B. S. Düring

and tilted/protruding heads on elongated necks. Additional elements, such as facial

features, occasional breasts or arms, which also form a figure, are optional extras
adding a unique twist to a standard icon. It appears that, as for the Philia figurines,
the intercomparability of these objects was of great importance.
As was the case for the Philia, there is a workshop site at Souskiou-Laona (Bolger,
2016; Peltenburg, 2019), but it is unlikely that the standardization of this type was
the result of the centralization of production, and it is more likely that these objects
were produced by multiple craftspeople at a variety of locations.
The cruciform figurines developed out of older types of figurines, made of other
materials, such as stone and ceramics that existed in the Late Ceramic Neolithic on
Cyprus (Peltenburg, 1982a). In the Early Chalcolithic, we see the earliest picrolite
figurines that resemble cruciform. The type becomes common in the Middle Chal-
colithic (3500–2900 BCE); hundreds are known from across the island. In the Late
Chalcolithic they are still found, but it is not clear whether the production of this type
continued. It would appear therefore that cruciforms developed out of a pre-existing
figurative tradition in prehistoric Cyprus.
If we focus specifically on the use of picrolite as a raw material, we can trace
its use back to the Late Aceramic Neolithic. There are various little ornaments and
hooks dating to this period that were produced from this material (Peltenburg, 1991).
The same types were made in the Ceramic Neolithic. It is plausible, that they were
made of pebbles found in the stream beds of the Kouris and Karyotis rivers. Indeed,
Picrolite pebbles have been found at a number of Neolithic sites. These pebbles are
relatively small, and this is reflected in the limited size of these artefacts.
In the Chalcolithic, however, larger objects started to be produced from picrolite,
and it is likely that picrolite was in part mined from its sources, where it occurs in
veins, or plates in the rock. Peltenburg (1982b, 1991) has even suggested that this
might have led to the first exploitation of copper. Interestingly, the cortex of the
veins of picrolite is frequently visible in the cruciform figurines, as for example on
the famous figurine from Yiali, where the cortex is visible on the knees. Indeed, the
very shape of the cruciform, with its bent knees, outstretched arms and tilted head, is
inherently problematic in a material that occurs in small sizes and plate-like veins. I
think this was the point. Like in the Philia figurines, the Chalcolithic figurine makers
were deliberately pushing the edge of what was possible in this particular material,
and the products would have been appreciated as such because people knew what
sizes and forms picrolite occurred in.

A Matter of Value

How then did these Chalcolithic trade networks start, and when and how did objects
acquired through trade start to function as a means for social distinction? In my
opinion, this leads to the question why these objects were considered valuable, which
is worth pursuing.
5 Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia 79

What is value? In scholarship it is often defined as consumer value (what one

is willing to exchange or pay for a product) or production value (how much labour
went into the production of an object). While these two types of value can help to
establish a relative exchange value, neither does actually do much to explain the why
question. Why is an object desirable? Or, to use the terminology of Appadurai how
does it fit into a culturally specific regime of value? The concept of regimes of value
foregrounds how objects circulate in specific cultural horizons (Appadurai, 1986: 4;
2013: 60).1 Many scholars have found the regimes of value concept useful to discuss
how goods are meaningful in specific cultural settings (Myers, 2001; Flad, 2012;
Papadopoulos & Urton, 2012: 17). Archaeologically, the regimes of value concept
has not been explored much, but I believe it has much potential.
I would like to illustrate why I find the concept of regimes of value useful by
considering an example from fieldwork in Turkey I executed about a decade ago,
at the site of Barcın Höyük. At this excavation, we employed a group of Kurdish
migrant workers hailing from southeastern Turkey, working as day labourers in agri-
culture and construction. They were magnificent workers, the best I ever encountered.
They had curious collective habits I could not understand at the time. All the senior
workers had packages of Marlboro cigarettes, instead of the much cheaper Turkish
alternatives. Why, did these men, who earned very modest incomes, insist on smoking
expensive cigarettes? (actually they seldom smoked them, but they did produce them
at key moments). Then, a year later, these men had completely abandoned smoking.
Instead, they all brandished fancy mobile phones (not smartphones, as these did not
yet exist). Again, they rarely used these phones but they displayed them as often as
they could.
Obviously, for these workmen the mobile phones substituted the purpose previ-
ously taken by the Marlboro cigarettes. Both clearly were important as markers
of social identity: a serious man marks his achievement by an act of conspicuous
consumption of an expensive product. The Marlboro cigarettes and phones were of
key importance in the articulation of being a man, and it was particularly important
to communicate ownership of these goods to peers.2
I will argue that this type of ‘social value’ has two characteristics. First, it builds
on people’s previous knowledge and experience. Second, standardization of objects
facilitates the communication of values (this is why the workmen insisted specifically
on Marlboro).
If we now compare this example to the Kilia and cruciform cases, we can note
these two aspects. In the Philia and Cruciform exchange networks, we see that crafts-
manship is important in that the limits of what was possible in stone production were
deliberately pushed. In both cases, these objects reference older craft traditions and

1 Graeber is very critical of this concept, arguing that the regimes of value as used by Appadurai
is concerned mainly with power, or how elites manipulate the flow of goods to serve their own
interests, and that there is little cultural content in the concept (Graeber, 2001: 32–33; also van
Binsbergen & Geschiere, 2005: 19), although Graeber does not provide any such cultural content
himself in his Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2011).
2 These are not what economist call ‘positional goods’ (e.g. Brighouse & Swift, 2006), as the point

was to signal membership of a collective rather than to communicate and individual status.
80 B. S. Düring

iconographic repertoires through which consumers could connect to these objects

and appreciate their craftsmanship. Thus, these objects clearly linked to culturally
specific knowledge of materials and craft technologies and, to a more limited degree,
iconographic repertoires.
Further, in both the Philia and Cruciform exchange networks stylistic standardiza-
tion was apparently of key significance. Thus, it was important not simply to have a
well-crafted stone object that referenced previous cultural repertoires, but that object
had to be a variation of a type, an iconic object. Thus, these objects most likely served
to signal membership of a collective rather than individual status.
Thus, I argue that Chalcolithic regimes of value revolved around: first, referencing
older categories of material culture; second, referencing widespread craft traditions;
and third, required a substantial degree of standardization. Of course, we will never
know the meaning that Philia and cruciform figurines had in Chalcolithic Asia Minor
and Cyprus, even if it is highly likely that, like the Marlboro cigarettes and mobile
phones of my dig workers, they would be important in the constitution and negotiation
of social identities.
What is clear is that these are among the earliest craft objects exchanged in Asia
Minor and Cyprus. Once the idea of exchanging craft products had caught on, and
probably the use of these craft products for creating social distinctions, a new world
opened up. In the wake of the Philia and cruciform exchange networks we see a
marked increase in connectivity, reflected in the increased evidence for contact in
ceramics, trade in craft products (such as imported faience beads and spurred annular
pendants in Cyprus) (Peltenburg, 2018), and the emergence of metallurgy and the
trade-in metals and metal artefacts, as exemplified in a copper axe recently found on
Cyprus to be dated around 2600 BCE (Düring et al., 2018). Arguably, this process
led towards the first globalization episode of the eastern Mediterranean which I
have already introduced and which, as I am convinced, was rooted in the earlier
development of exchange networks of crafted objects in the Chalcolithic.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Reinhard Jung and Stefanos Gimatzidis for inviting me
to Vienna to their wonderful symposium and for their patience with me while producing this paper.

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Chapter 6
The Bornhöck Burial Mound
and the Political Economy of an Únětice
Ruler

Roberto Risch, Harald Meller, Selina Delgado-Raack, and Torsten Schunke

Abstract The Circum-Harz group of the Central German Únětice Culture (c. 2200–
1550 BCE), which finally unified the Late Neolithic Corded Ware and Bell Beaker
Cultures, exhibits a remarkably high level of social complexity. Based on the funerary
record and the structured composition of the metal hoards, it has been suggested that
this social entity was developed into a state organisation ruled by a dominant leader
and supported by armed troops. However, the surplus economy necessary to supply
this army and other state servants, which would not work in agricultural production,
has not been confirmed so far. In this sense, the burial mound of Bornhöck in the
communal district of Raßnitz, Saalekreis district, near Dieskau with its well-known
weapon hoards, offers new insight into the economic organisation of an Únětice
community, especially with regard to its rulers. In this socio-historical context, the
study of grinding equipment coming from the stone core protecting the central burial
chamber turns to be of crucial importance. Our study shows that an exceptional
number of highly efficient grinding slabs, specifically designed to carry out intensive
grinding processes, was concealed in this funerary context. Moreover, these tools
were markedly different from the grinding slabs present in the typical Únětice long-
houses. As a result, the Bornhöck provides direct evidence of the existence of three
characteristic elements of a state organisation, i.e. the centralisation of an important
part of agricultural production, probably through some type of taxation mechanism,
the control of surplus value by the dominant class of Únětice, and the existence of a
substantial population dependent on this surplus. As an army seems the most plau-
sible consumer of large amounts of food supplies, indirectly, the macrolithic tools of
the Bornhöck confirm the monopoly on the use of force hold by the ruler buried in
it.

R. Risch (B) · S. Delgado-Raack

Departament de Prehistòria, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: Robert.Risch@uab.cat
H. Meller · T. Schunke
Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie
Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle, Germany

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 85

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_6
86 R. Risch et al.

Introduction

The recovery of the Sky Disk of Nebra from the illegal antique market in 2002 set
out an array of research programmes devoted to the understanding of the society in
which the first clear recognisable calendar known in Europe could have become a
meaningful artefact.1 This research has gradually lead to a better understanding that
the Early Bronze Age of Central Germany, more specifically known as the Circum-
Harz group of the Únětice Culture, saw the rise of a social and political entity,
which does not conform well to conventional categories proposed by twentieth-
century functionalist anthropology, such as chiefdom (Service, 1962 [1971]). This
has revived the discussion about whether state societies could have risen in Europe,
particularly during the Early Bronze Age (c. 2200–1600 BCE), independently and
in a different way than from their Near Eastern, Egyptian, and probably also Aegean
neighbours (Lull & Risch, 1995; Nocete, 2001; Chapman, 2003; Contreras, 2009–
2010; Lull et al., 2011; Meller, 2019a, 2019b, 2019d). This discussion can easily
drift into a sterile academic debate between different research traditions about which
categories we use to communicate, if the distinctive socio-economic relations and
the means of exploitation of the state are not addressed.
Beyond the teleological meaning that the different state theories have attached to
this historical category, most of them probably coincide in relating the appearance
of the state to the existence of stratified or class societies, in which individuals and
social groups can clearly be distinguished in terms of their asymmetric access to
wealth and power.2 These privileges are warranted and legitimised in space and time
through different mechanisms and institutions. Legally, this requires the imposition
of some form of permanent, usually hereditary, property rights and the establishment
of territorial limits, within which these privileges are imposed. The dynastic rule is
another institution by which economic and political privileges are often fixed in
time. Effectively, the enforcement of law and domination demands the existence
of specific mechanisms of coercion and the concentration of means of violence in
the hands of a dominant class. Apart from the violent imposition of privileges and
rights, states always develop their own mechanism of psychological coercion, for
example through rituals and imagery of violence, in order to give rise to individual
fear and obedience, which form the subjective fabric of domination and hegemony.
In general, the ideological and ceremonial paraphernalia of the state are essential to
its legitimation.3
Economically, all state organisations are dependent on the production of surplus
profit, rather than wealth. While the first always implies an unequal individual appro-
priation of social production directly or indirectly derived from the exploitation of
workforce, wealth is the pool of goods and services accessible to a society, which can
be distributed according to many different criteria (Risch, 2016). Rent, tribute but

1 For informations on the Nebra Sky Disc see e.g. Meller (2010, 2013a).
2 For a discussion of the different state theories, see Lull and Micó (2011).
3 For a discussion of the glorification of violence see Risch (2020). For legitimation strategies in the

Únětice Culture see Meller (2019d).

6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 87

also plain robbery are some of the mechanisms that elites have conventionally drawn
on in order to benefit from collective work. However, in state societies, surplus is
no longer just the economic profit or ill-gotten gains of the dominant class. Through
an increasingly complex circulation process, material goods and services are trans-
formed into surplus value, which can be managed, stored and transformed into new
goods and services that ultimately benefit the dominant group. The development of
specific crafts, such as those devoted to the production of weapons, or setting up an
army and a priestly caste, form part of this realisation process of surplus. Conse-
quently, the production, as well as circulation of surplus profit or added value, in
modern economic terminology, is critical to the qualification of any social group or
archaeological entity as a state society.
While sociological approaches to the Early Bronze Age societies of central Europe
have mainly been based on funerary evidence, hoarding praxis, and, lately, also
to settlement patterns, the recent discovery of the Bornhöck burial mound, near
Dieskau, Saalekreis district, has provided unexpected insights into the organisation
of an Únětice community and the economic power of its rulers (Meller & Schunke,
2016). A substantial number of macrolithic tools were recovered from the remains
of what appears to have been one of the largest funerary monuments of Central
Europe. Most of these artefacts were intentionally deposited in the stone core that
protected the large wooden funerary chamber, indicating a direct relation between
these tools and the ruler buried inside. This paper aims to analyse this key source
of palaeoeconomic information and to explore if socio-economic strategies emerged
in the Únětice society that made the economic exploitation and the accumulation of
surplus possible.

The Únětice Society of Central Germany

Towards the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BCE, the end of the Neolithic,
marked the onset of profound political and economic change in Central Europe. As
a consequence, a new social entity, commonly referred to as the Únětice Culture,
emerged at the start of the Bronze Age. In many aspects, it was different both from
earlier Corded Ware and Bell Beaker Cultures as well as from subsequent Bronze
Age societies. The Circum-Harz group of the Central German Únětice Culture is of
particular relevance. Its characteristic grave, settlement and hoard finds date from
2200 to 1550 BCE and can be found in the area north, east and south of the Harz
mountain range (see, inter alia, Zich, 1996; Evers, 2012; Evers & Witt, 2019).
The Circum-Harz region, the so-called Lössbörde, is among the most fertile areas
of the world. Its deep chernozem soil lies in the precipitation shadow of the Harz
mountain range and thus provides ideal conditions for agriculture (cf. Kainz, 1999:
21–22, 27–29). After 2200 BCE, a new settlement pattern was established on these
soils and in proximity to watercourses, which gave access to water and the waterways
that form the natural communication routes of the region (e.g. Schunke, 2019). The
basic socio-economic unit was the typical Únětice longhouse, which could stand
88 R. Risch et al.

Fig. 6.1 Distribution map of the Circum-Harz Únětice group (c. 2200–1550 BCE) in central
Germany and the sites mentioned in the text. The distribution of hoards and graves containing
weapons, as well as natural boundaries, possibly indicates the existence of distinct territories. In the
(putative) territories of Naumburg and the Goldene Aue princely graves have yet to be discovered.
The hoard find of Nebra, which is located in between the different territories, has not yet been
associated with any particular group (map by J.-H. Bunnefeld and B. Janzen, LDA Sachsen-Anhalt,
based on data from von Brunn, 1959; Zich, 1996; Meller, 2014, with additions)

either isolated or forming loose hamlets of over 40 buildings, as has just been docu-
mented in the settlement of Pömmelte (Fig. 6.1). Their construction and ground plans
are highly standardised and symmetrical, suggesting the existence of some notion of
modular building (Meller & Zirm, 2019; Schunke & Stäuble, 2019). While the width
of these two-aisled houses tends to be rather uniform (ca. 5.5–7 m), their length varies
from less than 15 m to nearly 40 m (Schunke, 2019; Ganslmeier, 2019; Schunke &
Stäuble, 2019). The rare and large three-aisled hall-like buildings can reach over
50 m in length and 11 m in width (Küßner & Wechler, 2019; Schunke & Stäuble,
2019). The high variability of the resulting living spaces (ca. 80–500 m2 ) suggests
the existence of notable differences in terms of the demographic and/or economic
strength of longhouses. Although their original floor levels are missing due to erosion
and ploughing, stall areas and storage facilities including large vessels containing
animal fats have been identified in better-preserved buildings (e.g. Schüler et al.,
2019; Walter et al., 2019). Besides the longhouses, settlements can also include
auxiliary buildings of still undefined function, large workshop areas, wooden path-
ways, fenced areas and wells (Meller et al., 2019). All this reveals the existence of
economic activities on a supra-domestic level.
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 89

Large-scale cooperation is attested in the construction, maintenance and use

of circular enclosures since the late Bell Beaker period, such as Pömmelte or
Schönebeck, both in the Salzlandkreis district (Spatzier, 2017, 2019). Both enclo-
sures are located close to the river Elbe and at the northern fringes of the Circum-Harz
Únětice territory and were in use up to the end of the 3rd millennium BCE.
The Pömmelte rondel was built around 2300 and intentionally destroyed by 2050
BCE presumably by pulling and burning the rondel’s posts. The Schönebeck circular
trench was built a little later and probably continued to function after Pömmelte
was abandoned. Both structures were in use contemporarily during at least part of
the twenty-two–twenty-first centuries BCE, but their function seems to be partially
different. The Pömmelte rondel had a diameter of approximately 115 meters with
29 up to 1.3 meters deep shaft pits dug into the ditch. Pottery, animal bones, stone
axes, but also different human bodies or body parts had been deposited in these
shafts. Several skulls show trauma (Stecher & Alt, 2019), so that the possibility
of human sacrifices can be considered. The deposits of individual grinding stones
and coarse stone tools in these pits are particularly noteworthy. The neighbouring,
somewhat younger Schönebeck rondel enclosure, however, was smaller with a diam-
eter of approximately 90 m. The main difference, between them, however, is the
lack of surrounding graves, and in particular shaft pits with sacrificial deposits in
Schönebeck. The only deposit in the circular ditch of this site is a hoard made up of
a cushion stone and a possible grinding stone (Bertemes, 2020). Both structures are
likely to have had ritual significance due to their astronomical orientations (Meinike,
2019; Schlosser, 2019) and the sacrificial deposits. They clearly reflect the change
from human sacrifice to more abstract religious ideas and actions (Meller, 2019a:
65–67).
A more detailed insight into the social structure of the Circum-Harz Únětice group
is provided by the funerary structures. Its stratified character is mainly expressed
by the barrow construction and burial furnishings—including weapons, tools and
a fixed set of gold ornaments. These rich furnishings characterise the so-called
princely graves of Leubingen, Sömmerda district (1942 ± 10 BCE), Helmsdorf,
Mansfeld-Südharz district (1829/28 BCE), and the recently explored barrow Born-
höck, Saalekreis district (second half of the nineteenth century BCE/c. 1800 BCE)
(Meller & Schunke, 2016; Meller, 2019a, 2019b, 2019d). The “overdisplay” of
weaponry, represented by two axes, three daggers and a halberd, in the burial of
Leubingen points towards the close ties between wealth and means of violence, on a
symbolic as well as physical level. Palaeopathological evidence has confirmed that
the prince of Helmsdorf was himself a victim of lethal violence inflicted by a dagger.
He had been stabbed through his belly, into his shoulder blade and in his arm (Nick-
lisch et al., 2020). The social distance between the ordinary population and these
political and military leaders is also illustrated by their diet, which was made up to
an exceptional extent of animal products (Knipper et al., 2015).
Based on the distribution of grave and hoard finds as well as existing natural
boundaries, the Circum-Harz group has been divided into five different political
territories or “domains” (Zich, 2016). Taking into account landscape features and the
distribution of Únětice finds, the borders of these territories have been subsequently
90 R. Risch et al.

slightly redefined (Meller, 2019a: 56–57; 2019c: 147–148) (Fig. 6.1). Moreover, after
the discovery of the once monumental Bornhöck tumulus and its association to the
Dieskau gold finds, discussed below, it seems highly plausible that, by 1850 BCE,
the whole of the Circum-Harz Únětice group merged into a unified political unit.
The high-status group represented by the princely graves was accompanied by a
second tier of individuals whose burials did not always contain weapons and were
characterised by the presence of much less gold. The golden artefacts involved are
hair-rings, a distinctive feature known since the Bell Beaker Culture (Meller, 2014:
616–628; 2019e; Schwarz, 2014: 719). The third tier included only a few burials
containing axes and daggers, while the fourth tier consisted of graves characterised
by bronze goods, often in the form of one or two pins. The two bottom tiers are made
up of burials furnished only with pottery vessels, or completely unfurnished graves
(Schwarz, 2014: 719–725).
The composition of the metal hoards has been recognised as a third source of
information revealing the character of the Circum-Harz Únětice society and, more
specifically, its forces of physical coercion (Meller, 2015, 2017, 2019a). The central
German hoards known so far and which largely date from between 2000 and 1625
BCE, contain a total of 1178 axes, 26 halberds, 18 daggers and eight double axes,
while jewellery (indeed, almost exclusively ring ornaments) is of secondary impor-
tance (Meller, 2019a, 2019c). In contrast, graves from the same period have only
yielded 10 axes, 3 halberds and 27 daggers. The warriors’ weapons were, therefore,
preferentially placed in hoards, rather than graves.
To follow this trail, it needs to be noticed that many of the deposited axes, as well
as halberds and daggers, display obvious traces of use (cf. Kienlin, 2008; Behrendt
et al., 2015: 98). They were, therefore, not made specifically for deposition; rather,
their handles were removed at the end of their use-life, before the weapons were
permanently concealed in the earth. On the other side, metal analyses have shown
that the axes from the individual hoards show a very similar composition (Rassmann,
2010: 813–815; Meller, 2017: Fig. 7). Therefore, it can be assumed that the axes from
each hoard were the serial production of a single workshop. As no stone or fired clay
molds are known from Central Germany so far, the materially and metrically highly
standardised weapons probably were cast in forms of sand or unburned clay. The
batch then stayed together during its whole use-life—as did their carriers—until
they were deposited years later. But, which event lead these communities to collect,
un-haft and conceal the metal blades?
The quantitative analysis of the hoards of Central Germany has revealed that the
number of axes in hoards with more than ten axes is not coincidental. The smallest
unit visible in the hoards comprised 10 or 15 axes. Larger hoards show a tendency
to include ca. 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 or 300 axes. Moreover, the ratio between axes and
halberds is 1:45, with daggers 1:65, and with double axes 1:150. Taking into account
that these ratios involve weapons, these numerical sequences remind one of military
hierarchies, as have been proven to exist throughout military history since antiquity
(Meller, 2015; 2017; 2019a: 53–57). If this reading is correct, the smallest unit visible
in the hoards comprised ca. 15 axes or “soldiers”. The unit of 45 “soldiers” would
then have been led by a halberd-bearer, and the unit of 65 “soldiers” would have been
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 91

under the command of a dagger-bearer. The largest combat unit of 150 individuals
would have been led by a double axe-bearer. In sum, the number of weapons in the
hoarding seems to reflect the number of available warriors and corresponds to the
meaning of the respective prince’s grave (Fig. 6.1). It follows, that the princes of the
Dieskau territory, who were buried in Bornhöck mound, could have warrior groups
with a size of at least 300 warriors. Of course, the number of warrior groups cannot
be established, as most hoards probably remain unknown.
The hierarchical structure of these troops might be expressed by the colours of the
distinctive Únětice weapons, which were determined through the metal composition
(Meller, 2019a: 57–62; 2019c; Wunderlich et al., 2019). Tin alloyed and, conse-
quently, shiny gold-coloured weapons were preferentially placed in graves, but not
deposited in hoards. The axe from the Dieskau I hoard even consists entirely of gold.
These colour and material differences seem to mirror the clearly structured Únětice
society.
The possibility that hoarded weapons legitimately represent actual “soldiers” and
“military units” is strongly supported by the recent discovery of an Early Bronze
Age hoard and an unusually large (44 × 11 m), three-aisled longhouse at Dermsdorf,
Thuringia, located within sight of the Leubingen princely grave. The hoard consisted
of 98 axes and two possible dagger or halberd blanks found in a pottery vessel
near the ridge post of the longhouse. It dates to the transition of the phases Bz
A2a and Bz A2b (c. 1850–1700 BCE), and is therefore later than the Leubingen
princely burial (Behrendt et al., 2015; Küßner & Wechler, 2019). The length of the
building compared to modern ethnographic examples suggests that it could easily
have accommodated 98–100 people. The obvious conclusion is that the hoard may
have been a deposition of axe blades that had belonged to “soldiers” garrisoned in
what could be called a “men’s house” (Meller, 2013b: 520–521; Schwarz, 2014:
727–728). This military garrison and the earlier prince of Leubingen who was buried
nearby at the centre of the North Thuringian political territory show that there is
some continuity of political power in this micro-region. The group of “soldiers”
had possibly been issued the weapons by a prince and sacrificed them in front of
their ritual building when he died. His successor expressed his power by supplying
new axes to his army, thereby symbolically securing their loyalty. This military and
ritual praxis explains the serial production and the closely connected use of sets of
weapons, as opposed to a domestic production and use of particular objects. In the
absence of texts, the coherence between location, size and composition of hoards and
burials is probably the most reliable archaeological evidence that the Circum-Harz
Únětice territory was ruled by a dominant class, which had armies at their disposal,
and thus an enforcement or administrative staff.
However, the existence of coercive and administrative forces bound to a ruling
class must have required a steady production of surplus value through tribute, corvée,
slave labour, or a combination of these. Unfortunately, we know too little of the
activities taking place in the longhouses of different sizes and the auxiliary structures
identified in the settlements to trace the economic organisation of the communities.
The discovery and excavation of the remains of the Bornhöck tumulus, constructed
92 R. Risch et al.

with materials and debris transported from settlements, has provided exceptional
economic information.

The Bornhöck Funerary Monument

The largest Early Bronze Age burial mound in Central Europe, named Bornhöck
once lay in the Raßnitz parish, of Saalekreis district, and very near to Dieskau, an
area which is well-known for its weapon hoards. It was razed by workers from 1844
on, and in particular between 1850 and 1890 CE. Historical drawings and excavations
carried out between 2014 and 2018 revealed that the original Bronze Age mound
originally measured about 65 metres in diameter and 13 metres in height and had
successively been enlarged until it reached more than 80 metres in diameter and an
estimated 15 metres in height (Fig. 6.2). Like the princely barrows at Leubingen and
Helmsdorf, the Bornhöck contained a tent-like wooden central construction protected
by stone packing. The dismantling of this funerary monument between c. 1844 and
1890 CE only left parts of the lowest layer of the burial mount more or less unaltered.
During the nineteenth century, fertile soil and stone were highly valued material, used

Fig. 6.2 Plan of the large burial mound Bornhöck near Dieskau. It shows the remains of the tent-
like burial chamber, the stone packing and the wheel ruts made by the carts used to transport the
construction materials (Graphic design by J. Filipp, Bad Bibra)
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 93

for agriculture, road construction and houses. By the time of its nineteenth-century
destruction, the inner chamber had already been accessed through a shaft and robbed
out around the year 1200 CE. Most of the oak beams and planks had decayed or
were removed during the nineteenth century. However, well-preserved imprints of
the structure’s foundations make it possible to establish that the chamber’s outer
measurements were 5.8 m × 3.5 m which is considerably larger than the chambers
of the Leubingen and Helmsdorf graves. As the imprints also allowed us to measure
the angle of the diagonal “roof” planks, the height of the tent-like construction must
have reached ca. 3 m (Mellerl, 2019a: Fig. 6). A 14C data series taken from preserved
wood and charcoal dates the funerary monument to the second half of the nineteenth
century or about 1800 BCE (Meller & Schunke, 2016).
According to written sources, the extraordinary gold hoard of Dieskau I was
allegedly recovered only three kilometres away from the Bornhöck, in a place called
the “Saures Loch” (“Sour or Acrid Hole”) in 1874. It appears to have consisted of
13 gold artefacts. While eight of them seem to have been melted down by a Leipzig
jeweller, the remaining five gold artefacts (a flanged axe, two ribbed bracelets, one
open bracelet and a small lugged ring [Ösenring]) were sent to the former Royal
Museum in Berlin, from where they were subsequently taken to the Pushkin State
Museum in Moscow, Russia, after World War II (Filipp & Freudenreich, 2014).
Different observations suggest that the dismantling of the Bornhöck and the discovery
of the Dieskau gold are connected. It is most likely that the gold find originated from
a secondary chamber of the Bornhöck and was moved to the nearby find-spot “Saures
Loch” in an attempt to cover up the workers’ illegal extraction of the artefacts from the
barrow, which was the property of the local landowner (Meller, 2019a). Typological
criteria date the find to the Únětice phase Bz A2b, between ca. 1775 and 1625 BCE,
i.e. one to six generations later than the original burial in the Bornhöck.
The Dieskau gold finds represent a key assemblage, which is suitable for assessing
both the nature of Circum-Harz Únětice society as well as the Early Bronze Age in
Central Europe in general. Golden grave goods and particularly weapons cast in
gold distinguish the most exceptional hoards and graves, including political rulers,
from the late fourth millennium BCE onwards in Egypt, the Near East and south-
eastern Europe (Primas, 1988; Hansen, 2001; Meller & Bunnefeld, 2020). Moreover,
the micro-region around Dieskau has yielded the largest quantity of Early Bronze
Age metal finds anywhere in Europe, comprising more than 150 kg of bronze and
approximately 650 g of gold (cf. Filipp & Freudenreich, 2014)—and potentially
more than 1 kg of gold, if the lost Dieskau artefacts are included. Both the Bornhöck
mound and the hoards imply that this location was a centre of power over a period
of several centuries, starting with the construction of the burial mound around the
nineteenth century BCE, and lasting until the period between 1600 and 1550 BCE.
Such a power structure has no comparisons in central European prehistory in terms
of its longevity (Meller, 2013b: 520–523). With the emergence of a dynastic ruling
class, technologies of time measurement, as provided by the Nebra sky, also become
critical instruments of legitimation and coercion.
The number of weapons included in the hoards around the Bornhöck implies
that the rulers of Dieskau, compared with the previous “princes”, commanded the
94 R. Risch et al.

largest army and probably expanded their dominion over much larger territories,
possibly comprising the entire Circum-Harz region. The resources and means used
and concealed in the construction of their spectacular funerary monument confirm
the exceptional economic power of this dominant class.

The Palaeoeconomic Analysis of the Macrolithic Tools

of the Bornhöck Monument

The potential of macrolithic tools as key evidence for palaeoconomic studies stems
from the enormous variety of productive functions they performed in prehistoric soci-
eties (food processing, mining and metalworking, bone-, leather- and woodwork, tool
maintenance and repairing, construction, etc.) and their durability and abundance in
the archaeological record. They include abraders, smoothers, polishers, sharpeners,
grinding tools, mortars, pestles, axes, moulds, anvils and so forth. Many of them were
involved in working processes, which are otherwise hard to detect in the archaeo-
logical record. These tools provide crucial data on the social division of work, as
well as on the scale of economic activities at the household, settlement and regional
levels. Moreover, unlike most archaeological remains, they enable us to approach
production quantitatively by assessing the amount of resources used or the number
of people supplied, for example, with flour, which was the most common staple food
of the European Bronze Age.
A considerable number of macrolithic tools were found in the stone core of the
Bornhöck burial mound, which protected its central, tent-like funerary chamber.
According to the structural evidence documented during the exploration of the
remaining burial mound, the inner cairn had an original diameter of 18.5 m and
a height of c. 4 m. The total volume of stones covering the funerary chamber has
been estimated around 482 m3 , largely formed by complete or broken glacial boulders
and stones broken from the bedrock (Schunke, 2018). Several thousand foundlings
and other rocks, some of them measuring up to 0.9 m in length, must have been trans-
ported to the site from some distance, mostly 5–15 km and up to 25 km (Schiele,
2020). Many boulders were incorporated into the cairn without any further modifi-
cation, while others were broken down into smaller stones. Concentrations of rock
fragments and grit, identified on the original surface under the barrow, suggest that
part of the boulders were crushed on the site (Schunke, 2018: 101). Taking into
consideration the geology of the rocks, it can be estimated that the 482 m3 were
equivalent to a weight of 964,000 kg.
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 95

The Forces of Production

The productive and demographic implications of the exceptional economic resources

placed in the Bornhöck cairn emerge if we consider in the first place the variety of
macrolithic artefacts recovered in the remains of the Bornhöck. So far, 71 clearly
definable and two unspecific tools have been recovered in the preserved lowest level of
the cairn. Further insight is gained if this assemblage is compared with the macrolithic
tools of contemporary settlements, such as Eulau, located c. 32 km southwest of the
Bornhöck. Here, an excavation of 87,900 m2 , carried out between 2003 and 2005,
allowed the discovery of a minimum of 19 typical Únětice longhouses. Although the
original house floors were not preserved, 37 macrolithic tools were recovered, mostly
from storage and/or garbage pits. While they do not represent the totality of the tools
used in the settlements, pits are expected to provide a reliable picture of the everyday
garbage and materials disposed of by the community during the occupation of the
settlement, which is estimated to have spanned over 200 years, during the classic
Únětice phase (Ganslmeier, 2019).
The lithic assemblage from the basal layer of the Bornhöck is not only larger
when compared to the artefacts recovered during the extensive excavations of Eulau,
but tool types also differ in variety and frequency between the two sites (Fig. 6.3).
While grinding slabs and hammerstones are markedly overrepresented at the funerary
site, clearly identifiable grinders as well as mortars are missing. As is observed in

Fig. 6.3 Artefact categories identified in the Bornhöck cairn (N = 73) in comparison to the
settlement of Eulau (N = 37)
96 R. Risch et al.

Eulau, grinders should be more abundant in the archaeological record than grinding
slabs, given their superior material wear (Delgado-Raack & Risch, 2016). Most of
the hammerstones found in the Bornhöck show use-wear traces derived from the
regular, usually weekly, maintenance of the grinding surfaces. It follows that two
out of the three tool categories taking part in cereal processing were specifically
selected to form part of the burial mound. The exclusion of the grinders, which are
indispensable to carry out the cereal grinding process, is particularly surprising and
reveals the specific decisions taken during the building of the barrow.
As grinding slabs and grinders form a tribologically linked equipment and wear
concomitantly, it is questionable that the second could have continued in use, after the
corresponding grinding slabs had been placed into the burial mound. Considerable
abrasive processes would have been required to adjust the grinders to new surfaces,
which would only have been possible if the grinders were not very worn down or, in
other words, were sufficiently thick to allow the high material loss demanded by the
adjustment process. This suggests that grinders might have been (ritually) deposited
at a different place, either in a different part of the funerary monument, or, as we
suspect, inside or close to the workspaces where they were used, as also seems to
have been the case with metal axes (cf. Dermsdorf longhouse).
It cannot be ruled out that some of the artefacts found in the inner part of the
Bornhöck might have been related to the construction of the funerary monument.
Given the focused accumulation of grinding slabs and hammerstones as construction
material, rare artefact types, such as the heavy hammerstones, could be related to the
construction of the Bornhöck. This is probably also the case of two heavy grooved
hammers. A complete example weighs over 4 kg, while the fragment of a second
hammer suggests that this artefact was more than double the size and weight. Such
hammers have been found in many El Argar settlements and are not to be mistaken
for mining hammers (Delgado-Raack & Risch, 2017). Given the observed use-wear
traces, their function seems to be related to construction activities, especially the
placing of wooden beams in houses or maybe, during the construction of the funerary
chamber of the Bornhöck. The working of the wooden planks and beams on the site
was documented during excavations (Meller & Schunke, 2016: 449–452) and would
also have required the use of metal axes and adzes, which need to be sharpened
and repaired regularly. A sharpening tool and a hammer with traces derived from
metal forging and repairing correspond to these activities. The same might also be the
case with some of the multifunctional hammerstones/abraders (Fig. 6.3), particularly
those showing patterns of pressure marks carried out with a pointed object, such as
a bronze chisel or awl. These traces seem to be related to the severance or piercing
of materials such as leather, reed or basketry, which were probably used as bags or
baskets to carry smaller rocks, grit and earth from the charts, which transported this
material to the large burial being constructed. Reed has also been confirmed during
excavations and seems to have been used to line and cover the funerary chamber
(Schunke, 2018: 101).
In order to identify the economic value of the productive forces placed in the
Bornhöck, it is necessary to recognise that recent excavations could recover 12 m3 ,
or 24,000 kg, of the estimated 482 m3 , or 964,000 kg, of stones used to construct the
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 97

cairn surrounding the funerary chamber in an unaltered state. In some places, this
basal layer reached a maximal thickness of 0.6 m (Meller & Schunke, 2016: 441).
Where the original filling had remained in situ, it was formed eminently of stone
material, including macrolithic artefacts, while the proportion of soil and sand in
the inner cairn was not more than c. 5% (Fig. 6.2). Contrary, few stones and lithic
artefacts were observed in the exterior part of the mound with nearly 20,000 m3 soil
(Schunke, 2018: 109), indicating that a clear distinction between the stone and the
earthern part of the burial mound was made by its Únětice builders.
The preserved 12 m3 of the stone core contained the remains of 31 macrolithic
artefacts, weighing 1,615.78 kg. Of these, 22 tools are more or less preserved grinding
slabs, weighing 1,550.91 kg. This implies that c. 6.7% of the materials used to
construct the excavated lowest 0.6 m of the stone cairn of the Bornhöck mound
consisted of stone tools, mainly grinding slabs, some of which must have weighed
over 175 kg. However, written reports from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
describing the destruction of the funerary mound and some of its archaeological
finds, suggest that large grinding slabs were also present in the upper layers of the
stone core. If we take the material of the well-documented 12 m3 as a reference, it is
possible to establish that c. 64,900 kg of the cairn would be macrolithic artefacts, of
which 62,295 kg correspond to grinding slabs. As the mean weight of the grinding
slabs recovered from the Bornhöck can be estimated to have been 105 kg, the total
number of slabs is estimated to have been 593.
A different method to estimate the total amount of tools placed in the cairn can
be applied, using the minimum number of grinding slabs. Taking into account the
degree of fragmentation of the 22 slabs recovered from the preserved 12 m3 of the
cairn, their minimum number corresponds to 13.6 tools. As nothing suggests that the
proportion and distribution of macrolithic tools were uneven in the 482 m3 of the
stone core, the projection of this minimum number on the whole cairn implies that
546 grinding slabs were built into the burial mound.
Such a volume of grinding tools clearly corresponds to a large population. How
many artefacts were available at each moment in the longhouses is difficult to esti-
mate, but our own ethno-archaeological studies in the compounds of extended fami-
lies in northern Ghana and central Mali suggest that large households usually owned
2–3 grinding slabs and grinders, several small abraders and hammerstones, as well
as some sharpening stones. Rarely, more than 6–10 stone tools are available at each
time in a compound formed by 12–24 persons (see also Roux, 1986 for households
in Mauritania; Gronenborn, 1994 for Northeast Nigeria; Hamon & Le Gall, 2013:
Fig. 8 for Mali).
One factor, which appears particularly constant in cross-cultural comparisons,
is the number of grinding tools available in the households. As cereal grinding in
America, Africa and Asia is regularly assigned to women, the number of slabs and
grinders tends to be equal to the number of adult women living in the houses (Horsfall,
1987; Hamon & Le Gall, 2013: 117–118; Robitaille, 2016: 429–456; Alonso, 2019).
Some artefacts might be stored, in the foresight that production of flour needs to be
increased or tools might break. Usually, women use the same tool kid until its material
exhaustion or breakage, given the close kinetic relation between body weight and size,
98 R. Risch et al.

and the tools in this physically highly demanding activity. This work organisation
only changes, if cereal grinding is carried out at a supra-domestic level, usually
under the control of a state or a dominant class. These specialised workshops are
well documented in the archaeological record and through iconographic evidence, as
well as in texts (Grégoire, 1992). A large number of persons, both men and female,
were working in these buildings and grinding cereal simultaneously on standardised
tools. Slaves or captives are also reported to have been forced to carry out this
strenuous work (Schirokauer & Brown, 2006: 89–90; Díaz del Castillo, 1992 [1577]).
A particularly impressive example is provided by Hittite sources, which refer to blind
prisoners who had to work in milling houses (Beal, 2016: 38–39; Trimm, 2017: 350–
351). Before we continue to delve into the cereal economy illustrated by the Bornhöck
macrolithic assemblage, it is necessary to analyse the technical features and intensity
of the use of the grinding tools.

Artefact Wear Intensity

The preservation of tools is always a critical variable in order to understand the organ-
isation of production and discard. The first difference noted between the macrolithic
artefacts of the Bornhöck princely grave and the settlement of Eulau, is their different
breakage pattern. Around 58% of tools recovered from the remnants of the funerary
cairn are still complete, while small fragments only represent c. 30% of the sample
(Fig. 6.4). Moreover, most of the fractures observed on the damaged artefacts show
a recent sheen and not the patina resulting from meteorisation and oxidation, which
usually appears on the original surfaces. It follows that most artefacts were broken

Fig. 6.4 Percentage values for the three categories of preservation of macrolithic artefacts
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 99

as a direct or indirect consequence of the dismantling of the burial in the nine-

teenth century AD. Two unpublished reports from 1915 to 1917 (Pritschöna, MQ,
OA-ID 2039 and “Sammlung Berger”) also mention the presence of complete and
exceptionally large grinding slabs, which had been carried away—partly by horses—
during the dismantling of the burial mound and were kept by private owners. As we
found only seven fragments which refitted into three artefacts, all the missing parts
must have been carried away from the site for constructive purposes. Contrary, in
the case of Eulau, only 42% of the artefacts are complete, and 40% are fragments,
presenting ancient fractures. The difference between both values (complete artefacts
and fragments) corresponds to slightly damaged artefacts (for the methodological
background, see Risch, 2002; Delgado-Raack, 2013). The material from the Bell
Beaker and early Únětice ritual enclosure of Pömmelte, where several stone tool
deposits have been defined (Spatzier, 2017), has a similar preservation stage as the
Bornhöck after the nineteenth-century dismantling works (Fig. 6.4).
Another way to approach the wear intensity of tools is to measure the material
loss that took place during their use-life in other words, their degree of mechanical
exhaustion (Fig. 6.4). In the case of grinding tools, this loss is best expressed by the
wear index of the querns (Risch, 2002: 54). The four more or less well-preserved
querns from Eulau have a mean minimum thickness of 91.5 mm, with a standard
deviation of 30.8 mm. In contrast, in the case of 15 grinding slabs of the Bornhöck
where the original minimum thickness can still be measured, the mean value is 289
± 92.4 mm. In conclusion, the Bornhöck grinding slabs are not only heavier but
also less used than the Eulau examples (Fig. 6.5). Furthermore, the reports mention
that the very large grinding slabs carried away in the nineteenth century AD were
“noch wenig benutzt” (only slightly used) (Pritschöna, MQ, OA-ID 2039, page 9).

0.9
0.8
Wear index (thickness/length)

0.7
0.6
Bornhöck
0.5
Eulau
0.4
Pömmelte
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0 20000 40000 60000 80000 100000 120000 140000 160000
Weight (g)

Fig. 6.5 Use intensity of complete grinding slabs in three different Únětice sites, expressed by the
relation between absolute weight and relative wear index, in which high or low values represent a
short or a long tool use, respectively
100 R. Risch et al.

It follows that these grinding slabs were perfectly operative, when they were placed
in the Bornhöck cairn. Experimental tests suggest that grinding slabs made out of
sandstone and used daily in household contexts, wear down c. 10 mm in thickness, per
year (Wright, 1993). This would imply that, on average, the Bornhöck querns could
have been used for another 20 years before breaking, if they were used in a domestic
context, which, as is still to be discussed, does not seem likely. Yet, it must also be
taken into account that the Únětice grinding slabs were made of significantly harder
rocks, such as granite, gneiss and porphyry, than the sandstone used by Wright. In
any case, the Bornhöck querns were perfectly operative and could still have been
used for the next decades, rather than years if they had remained in their original
workspaces.
Similar calculations can be carried out with the smaller-sized artefacts used in
percussion, pounding and abrading processes. In this case, however, their presence in
the cairn could be due to different causes. Hammerstones are required for the regular
roughening or sharpening of the grinding tools, while other tools could have served
directly on-site performing building tasks when constructing the barrow (Fig. 6.6).
Concentrations of rock fragments and grit, identified under the funerary mound,
confirm that porphyry and sandstone blocks were crushed on the site (Schunke,
2018: 101). Taking into account the different technological and mechanical require-
ments of both types of activities, a bimodal use is reflected by differences in artefact
weight and thickness (Fig. 6.7). Most of the hammerstones mirror the pattern known
from settlements, such as Eulau, confirming that they were brought to the Born-
höck together with the grinding slabs, once they had fulfilled a certain amount of
sharpening in relation to grinding equipment. A second thicker and heavier type
of hammer, so far unknown in domestic contexts, seems to have been used during
the preparation of the chamber for inserting beams or doing other kinds of “brick-
work”. In both cases, the macrolithic materials of the Bornhöck cairn were perfectly
functional artefacts, and many of them were still at an initial stage of their use-life.

The Cereal Grinding Technology of Únětice

The technical characteristics of the purposefully buried grinding slabs provide the
final clue to the meaning of the stone artefacts of the Bornhöck. The first outstanding
aspect is their weight and dimensions. The size and shape of the working surfaces are
directly linked to the amount of flour produced and to the workforce required by this
production. The shapes of the surfaces are described in terms of their longitudinal
and transversal profiles (Hürlimann, 1965; Zimmermann, 1988; Adams, 1993; Risch,
1995). Three mechanical premises play the determining role in the productivity of
grinding equipment, which is understood as the amount of flour gained per unit of
time: (a) the more accurate/precise the correspondence/matching between the active
surfaces of grinding slab and grinder, the higher their efficiency, (b) the larger the
contacting areas, the higher their efficiency and (c) the larger the contacting areas,
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 101

Fig. 6.6 Three hammerstones and pressure platforms shown from different sides, found in the
Bornhöck barrow with use wear traces caused by roughening grinding slabs, crushing stone, and
other heavy-duty tasks (drawing by M. Eguíluz)

the heavier the grinders and, consequently, the more physical strength that will be
required to perform the grinding process.
102 R. Risch et al.

Fig. 6.7 Metric features of hammerstones/abraders used for different tasks

Four basic types of grinding equipment are found in the ethnological and archae-
ological records of cereal-based economies, using stone against stone technology.4
In general terms, they can be divided into mechanisms using one-handed and two-
handed grinders, which is often related to the surface area in their reciprocal contact.
Two-handed grinders will exert much higher pressure on the grain than the one-
handed grinders, allowing for faster processing of flour. Experiments have also
confirmed that grinding in trough and flat grinding slabs was twice as productive
as in wider, basin-shaped slabs (Adams, 1993). Additionally, grinders can be moved
freely on the grinding surface or have fixed course, as in the case of overlapping,
usually concave grinders, or of trough grinding slabs. In the latter case, a more stan-
dardised forth and back trajectory of the grinder along the longitudinal axis of the
quern allows a fully mechanical movement, hindering lateral deviation of the grinder,
which would cause unnecessary oblique movements. As a result, the use of basin-
shaped as well as flat grinding slabs implies longer work processes in comparison
with fixed grinding equipment. However, as Adams has already stated, the fixed
grinding slabs do not allow the operator to vary his or her stroke in order to relieve
muscle stress (Adams, 1993: 336–340).
In the specific case of the Bornhöck, these technological differences get even
clearer. Compared with the Central European Neolithic as well as other Early Bronze
Age assemblages, the Bornhöck grinding slabs are by far the heaviest and largest
specimens discovered so far (Fig. 6.8). If we reconstruct the original size of some
fragmented artefacts weighing 125 and 175 kg, some grinding slabs would have been

4 Othermaterial combinations are also possible, as is the case in south-east Iberia, where the use of
wooden grinders and stone grinding slabs was experimentally and traceologically demontrated for
the Early Bronze Age (Risch, 2002).
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 103

Fig. 6.8 Two complete grinding slabs from the Bornhöck cairn. The left slab shows a very early
stage of use; the right one starts developing the typical trough (drawing by M. Eguíluz)

larger than 740 mm in length, 625 mm in width and 400 mm in thickness. Hence,
the expected contact area between grinding slab and grinder was higher in the case
of the grinding equipment of the Bornhöck than for any other known archaeological
context in Prehistoric Europe. This suggests that an increased productive capacity
was intended (in terms of flour yielded per unit of time), due to the wide area of
grinding surfaces in reciprocal contact.
Regarding the morphological features of the grinding equipment, the Bornhöck
shows another particularity (Table 6.1). During the preceding Neolithic period, over-
lapping, concave grinders were predominantly used on grinding slabs for cereal
grinding (type A, Table 6.1), while flat grinding surfaces were only occasionally in
use (type B, Table 6.1). At the end of this period, however, the number of flat tools
clearly increased and their use lasted throughout the Bronze Age (Graefe, 2009:
76; Gundelach, 2012). In the Bornhöck a totally new kind of grinding technology
appears, namely the trough-shaped grinding slab operated with a fixed grinder (type
C2; Table 6.1). Many of the type B and C1 slabs found in the cairn would have
also developed a clear trough had their use-life and wear been prolonged. Similar
artefacts have been observed in the sanctuary of Pömmelte, where this technology
is attested for the first time in the Early Bronze Age Saxony-Anhalt (c. 2300–2050
BCE). Here, both the grinding slabs and their grinders were deposited in the shaft-
like deposition pits cut into the circular ditch (Fig. 6.9). In contrast, this technology is
absent in the Eulau settlement (Table 6.1). Simple basin (type C1) and saddle-shaped
slabs (type A) seem to have been the predominant equipment, and the size of their
grinding surface is significantly smaller than at the Bornhöck, as should be expected
in domestic contexts.
The presence of trough-shaped grinding equipment in ritual sites such as
Pömmelte and Bornhöck does not seem to be a mere coincidence and highlights
 104

Table 6.1 Absolute frequencies of morphologically described grinding elements (grinding slab and grinder) for Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements and ritual
sites of Central Europe. *Following Zimmermann’s typological proposal, Kegler-Graiewski (2007) and Graefe (2009) subdivided type C into two subtypes,
which have been defined by Adams as basin and trough metates, well known among the Pueblo Indians (Adams, 1993: Fig. 2)
Types according to A B C* References
Zimmermann (1988)
Morphology of grinding Concave-convex Flat quern/flat grinder (C1) Basin quern/Small, (C2) Trough
equipment quern/overlapping convex grinder quern/Large, fixed
grinder grinder
Langweiler 8 (Early All grinding stones – – – Zimmermann (1988)
Neolithic) belong to this type of
equipment
Breitenbach (Early 9/62 5/1 2/0 – Zamzow (2020)
Neolithic)
Goseck (Early Neolithic) 5/4 0/1 – – Zamzow (in preparation)
North Hesse (Recent and 64/121 9/1 4/0 – Kegler-Graiewski (2007)
Late Neolithic)
Central Europe (Neolithic) Predominantly Occasionally – – Graefe (2009)
Pömmelte (Early Bronze – 0/1 6/0 2/3 Unpublished
Age)
Eulau (Early Bronze Age) 1/1 0/1 3/2 – Unpublished
Bornhöck (Early Bronze – 9/0 10/0 5/0 Unpublished
Age)
R. Risch et al.
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 105

Fig. 6.9 Trough-shaped grinding slab (left) with corresponding grinder (right) from Pömmelte.
The slab weighs 45 kg. The grinder weighs 11.5 kg (drawing by M. Eguíluz)

the link between a new, more intensive technology with monumental places of high
ideological and political relevance. In comparison with the Neolithic grinding tradi-
tion, the trough type is an inverted version of type A grinding technology (Table 6.1),
which implies a replacement of the overlapping grinders by much heavier grinders
dragged through a trough, whose depth increases along with the use-life of the slab.
On the other hand, unlike in the case of type A, the trough-shaped slabs would have
favoured that grinding stock could stay longer on the active side before being totally
ground. Pömmelte and Bornhöck were political and ritual sites with a much more
intense flour production, and separated from the domestic sphere.
This grinding technology is exceptional in its European context. Although, a
profound change has also been observed at the beginning of the El Argar Early
Bronze Age in south-eastern Spain, around 2200 BCE, which saw the introduction
of narrow concave/convex grinding tools operated with wooden grinders, no trough-
shaped grinding slabs are known from El Argar sites (Delgado-Raack & Risch,
2015). They are also not known in the whole Aegean Neolithic and Bronze Age
(Runnels, 1981). The development of grinding technologies is also different in the
north of the Italian Peninsula (Dal Ri, 1994). Trough metates are well studied in the
Southwest of the US, where they were introduced sometime after 200 AD (Adams,
1999). Their appearance has been linked to the introduction of a new variety of corn
(maíz del ocho), though other socio-economic factors still need to be considered. A
similar change occurred in central Germany at the transition from the Bell Beaker to
the Únětice period. In comparison with all other archaeological and contemporary
106 R. Risch et al.

contexts, where information on the shape and weight of grinders is available, the
Únětice C2 type tools are clearly exceptional (Table 6.2). In mean terms, they are
nearly twice as heavy as the domestic grinders documented in present-day north-
eastern Ghana and at least three times heavier than any Neolithic artefact recorded
in Central Europe. As heavier grinders slow the path of the grinding stroke, large
trough querns possibly represent the most efficient grinding technology before the
introduction of the rotary mill. However, this efficiency, resulting from their larger
abrasive surfaces, depends on greater work efforts and, consequently leads to greater
physical exhaustion (Hard et al., 1996; Hamon & Le Gall, 2013: 116).
As grinding is always a strenuous work and no significant changes have been
observed so far in the cereal record of the Early Bronze Age (Kretschmer & Harbig,
2019; M. Hellmund, LDA Saxony-Anhalt, personal communication), the introduc-
tion of a trough technology implies a change in the mode of production as well as
of consumption. The more intense workload suggests that part of the cereal grinding
activities left the domestic sphere, where the traditional technology with type A,
concave/convex slabs and comparatively light grinders continued to be used. The
exceptional size of the trough slabs and corresponding grinders even raises the possi-
bility that the latter were operated by two persons, each placed on opposed ends of the
slab.5 The grinding slabs buried in the Bornhöck seem to point to a relation between
the political organisation of Únětice and cereal production with this more specialised
and work-intensive technology. The control of specific grinding technology, which
was probably restricted to specific workshops, appears to be a critical factor in the
maintenance as well as ideology of the Únětice ruling class, which needed to be
massively underscored in its emblematic funerary monument.

Conclusion

The macrolithic material recovered from the remains of the Bornhöck burial mound
offers the first evidence concerning the economic power of the ruling class in Únětice
Bronze Age society. Considering the original dimension of the funerary monument
which was dismantled during the nineteenth century CE, it has been possible to
estimate that between 540 and 600 grinding slabs were transported and built into the
stone cairn covering its central funerary chamber. In agricultural economies such as
Únětice (Knipper et al., 2015), the number of grinding tools is directly related to
the size of the community which needs to be sustained. According to ethnographic
observations from domestic contexts of Africa, America and Asia, a cereal grinding
stone tends to be used daily to obtain flour required to nourish 4–5 individuals (Risch,
2002: 232–236). In such a scenario, between 2400 and 2700 persons could be supplied
with the means concealed in the Bornhöck barrow. However, it has been shown
that the Bornhöck grinding technology is excessive in a domestic context. The size,

5 Firstexperimental tests support this operative option where one person is placed at each side of
the grinding slab.
Table 6.2 Type and weight of grinders in different archaeological and contemporary contexts. *This weight belongs to a unique artefact, and is not representative.
**The 9250 g grinder documented in Bende (Ghana) was considered by all other women, except the owner, an excessive tool and which they would not use
Context & Nr Chronology Shape Weight-X Weight- Std.dev. Weight-Min. Weight-Max References
Langweiler 8 LBK Concave/convex 3873 g 1786 g 1805 g 6650 g Zimmermann (1988:
(N = 6) Fig. 645)
Paris Basin Early Neolithic Convex/convex 1378 g – c. 300 g c. 2500 g Hamon (2006: 45)
(N = c. 46)
Dietfurt Chamer K. Variable 2970 g 1149 g 1490 g 4550 g Böhner (1997)
(N = 5) (c. 3000–2700 BCE) (grinders identified by
authors)
Vinça, Central Balcans c. 5400–4600 BCE Variable c. 1500 g c. 1300 g 311 g 4329 g Vučković (2019:
Tables 6.1–6.4)
Alimizaraque Copper Age Highly variable 927 g 337 g 500 g 1900 g Risch (2008: P0/5tab2)
(N = 15) 2850–2200 BCE
Cerro de la Virgen, SE Bell Beaker Mainly 484 g 216 g 278 g 1250 g Delgado-Raack (2013)
Iberia (N = 20) 2500–2200 BCE straight/straight;
convex/convex
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy …

La Bastida, SE Iberia El Argar Mainly 2540 g 1233 g 554 g 11,600 g* Ache (2019: 169ff.)
2200–1550 BCE concave/convex
Marki Alonia, Cyprus EC II-MCII Convex/convex 5764 g 2040 g 2800 g 12,000 g Frankel and Webb
(N = 32) 2400–1700 BCE (2006: 224, Table 6.8)
NE Ghana Twenty-first century Concave/convex 5900 g 2091 g 4000 g 9250 g* Unpublished
(N = 5) CE
Pömmelte (N = 3) Bell Beaker-Únětice C2 type (trough) 11,100 g 1606 g 9700 g 11,500 g Unpublished
Kleinpaschleben (N = 2300–2050 BCE
1)
107
108 R. Risch et al.

weight and shape of the grinding tools indicate a specialised cereal production, which
demanded a large workforce, probably working more intensively than in a domestic
sphere. Written documents report that in centrally controlled Mesopotamian mills, an
average of 7 litres and up to 9.25 litres of flour could be produced per person/grinding
slab per day (Grégoire, 1992: 331; 1999: 229). Larger and heavier grinding tools,
together with longer grain processing sessions could easily have allowed a 50%
increase of production, covering the daily needs in carbohydrates of 3600–4050
individuals.
The situation observed in Únětice settlements, such as Eulau, further implies
that this production was not linked to the common longhouses, where the simpler
technology, derived from Neolithic traditions, continued in use. It follows, that the
large trough grinding slabs, with extensive working surfaces, supplied food to a
different group of persons and/or at different occasions, unrelated to the domestic
sphere. The fact that large trough querns have been found at a certain distance from
longhouse settlements in Central Germany provides further support to the socio-
economic difference between both subsistence technologies. It is also questionable
whether these heavy grinding tools could have been operated by the dwellers of the
usual longhouses, who continued to use the Neolithic technology for the everyday
needs of the domestic sphere. The simultaneous use of the over 500 grinding tools
placed in the Bornhöck mound, whose operation demands exceptional physical force,
starts to highlight the existence of an exploited class, directly bound to the Dieskau
rulers. In sum, slaves or servants and a clientele class are the suspected protagonists
at each end of the production and consumption cycle. While the flour they produced
could have supplied specialised craftsmen/women and above all the ruling class itself,
the dimension of production implied by the artefacts placed in the Bornhöck mainly
points towards a standing military force as the main recipient of this subsistence
good.6 It is difficult to oversee a ritual and political connection between the deposition
of weapons in hoards and the concealment of the grinding equipment, which was
indispensable to feed substantial forces or clientele, in the funerary monument of
a dominant ruler. In both cases, the replacement of hundreds of weapons and food
processing tools requires a supra-domestic level of economic organisation, such as
that of a state, capable of mobilising substantial resources and extensive exchange
networks.
The Bornhöck does not seem to have been the only Early Bronze Age funerary
monument, which demonstrates this relation between grinding technology and polit-
ical domination. The barrow of Szczepankowice Ia, dated around 1940–1885 cal
BCE, contained 34 querns (Sarnowska, 1969; Pokutta, 2014: 139), of significant
size and weight (Furmanek et al., 2015: 94). They also seem to have been present in

6 Theirvariable wear and their position in the core of the mound exclude the possibility that these
tools were manufactured and used specifically to supply the workforce in charge of the construction
of the Bornhöck.
6 The Bornhöck Burial Mound and the Political Economy … 109

the well-known princely grave of Ł˛eki Małe (Pokutta, 2014: 139); although this is
not confirmed by Furmanek et al. (2015: 94).7
Our study suggests that the Únětice “princes” did not only derive their wealth
from salt exploitation or central German copper, as has often been assumed (e.g.
Montelius, 1900: 77–78; Jahn, 1950: 86), but also on the control of part of the cereal
production and turned it into surplus profit. This economic power would have allowed
to maintain a standing army and probably other types of clientele such organisation
of specialised forces of production and of violence form the economic and military
foundations of state societies.

Acknowledgements We acknowledge the support of Marina Eguíluz and José Antonio Soldevilla
in the study and documentation of the macrolithic tools of Saxony-Anhalt. The authors are also
grateful to Konstanze Geppert and Jan-Heinrich Bunnefeld for their feedback on a previous version
of the paper and to Louis Nebelsick for editing the final text.
This research is supported by the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology
of Saxony-Anhalt and by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
(HAR2017-85962-P), the AGAUR of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR1044) and the ICREA
Academia programme.

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Chapter 7
Property and Markets: The Uses of Land
in Pharaonic Egypt Beyond
Redistributive and Neoliberal
Approaches

Juan Carlos Moreno García

Abstract Ancient Egypt has been considered the quintessential example of a redis-
tributive centralized economy. Neo-institutionalism, on the contrary, emphasizes that
markets, law, institutions and private property reduced transaction costs, promoted
economic rationalism and led to increased economic specialization. Pharaonic Egypt
provides some evidence about private possession of land in which markets and a
business-oriented mentality operated in a social and economic environment rational
but alien to modern capitalist values. Kinship ties limited the emergence of individ-
ualist interests, but kings promoted such behaviour in an attempt to curve down the
power of noble families. Yet individualist strategies remained limited because insti-
tutions (particularly temples and the crown) were crucial in the formation of private
land portfolios and narrowed the possibilities for the emergence of a significant
market of land.

Introduction

If there is a domain in which the contributions of pharaonic Egypt (that is to say,

the period of Egyptian history preceding the Macedonian conquest in 332 BCE)
to comparative history have been negligible, economic history comes immediately
to mind. The reasons are diverse (Moreno García, 2014a). On the one hand, the
priorities of research have focused traditionally on art history and religion, as it was
prestigious monuments (mostly tombs and temples) that provided easily the kind of
beautiful objects and spectacular discoveries avidly searched for by Egyptologists to
satisfy the insatiable appetite of museums, collectors and national governments. On
the other hand, the combined weight of the biblical story of Joseph, of the stereo-
type of a despotic hyper-centralized and all-encompassing “oriental” interventionist
state, and the relative abundance of papyri (interpreted as the surviving evidence of
a massive documentation produced by a meticulous bureaucracy at the service of

J. C. M. García (B)
CNRS (UMR 8167), Sorbonne University, Paris, France

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 117

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_7
118 J. C. M. García

kings), persuaded historians that markets, private economy and property had played
a very minor role in the land of the pharaohs. Finally, concepts such as “redis-
tribution” provided a respectable intellectual background (a Polanyian and social-
sciences based one) that helped justify this traditional view about the ancient Egyptian
economy (Bleiberg, 1996; Grandet, 1994; Janssen, 1975). However, a slight change
in the perspective adopted shows that such a view is largely unjustifiable. Exca-
vating temples, tombs and monuments built and used by the elite (a very tiny part of
pharaonic society) forcibly provided abundant information about state institutions
and their activities, much less about other actors whose economic importance was in
all probability as significant (if not more) than those of institutions. Two examples
may illustrate this point. The Wilbour papyrus, a detailed record of more than 3000
plots of land, their holders and the taxes they paid in a section of Middle Egypt,
written around 1200 BCE, may convey an image of thorough administrative control.
Yet this document only concerns about 5–10% of all the cultivable land in this area of
the Nile Valley (Gardiner, 1948). As for a slightly early document, papyrus Harris I, it
records massive donations of land, people, cattle and huge amounts of diverse kinds
of goods to the temples of Egypt, to the point that it has been estimated that about
one-third of the land of the country was actually in their hands (Grandet, 1994). But
what about the other 66%, not to speak of the 90–95% of land not referred to in the
Wilbour papyrus? In a similar vein, the archaeology of cities and of their economic
activities (trading areas, workshops, etc.) is still in its infancy (Moeller, 2005). This
means that crucial economic actors such as traders, craftsmen and other specialists
are poorly documented in the archaeological and textual record, except when they
worked at the service of kings, temples and the elite. It is in these cases that they
happen to be mentioned in letters and administrative sources that help them emerge
from the shadows in which they usually lie. As for the rural world, it still remains one
of the greatest unknowns in Egyptian history, a paradox when one thinks that Egypt
is very often characterized as one of the major breadbaskets of the ancient world.
Little is known, for example, about the role played by wealthy peasants and their
economic choices and land portfolios, about market-oriented crops, about peasant
productive strategies and the organization of their domestic workforce, about the
weight of different modalities of work prevailing in the countryside (sharecroppers,
compulsory workers, leasers, etc.) and their seasonal mobilization depending on the
needs of institutions and landholders, about the forms and uses of the landscape
resulting from these strategies, not to mention the impact of state taxes on all these
aspects and potential choices. The fact that wealthy peasants paid their taxes occa-
sionally in gold directly to the royal treasury, or that huge amounts of precious metals
were “laundered” by robbers through the acquisition of fields and orchards, reveals
that some kind of proto-monetization was operative in the countryside and that a land
market, even if modest, enabled modest and wealthy tenants to acquire agricultural
plots (Moreno García, 2013c; Katary, 2000, 2001; McDowell, 1992).
Despite these severe limitations in our knowledge of pharaonic economy, scat-
tered textual references, small archives and isolated documents, as well as occasional
archaeological evidence, allow nevertheless to address topics relevant in on-going
discussions on ancient economic history. Among them, one can think on potential
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 119

economic growth in ancient societies, the role played by markets and profit-seeking
economic activities, the emergence of “rational” economic behaviour, the importance
of law and the use of contracts in the reduction of transaction costs, etc. (Kehoe et al.,
2015). Many of these discussions have been inspired partly by an increasing popu-
larity of neo-institutional models in the study of ancient near eastern societies (Jursa
et al., 2010; van der Spek et al., 2015; Kleber & Pirngruber, 2016; Pirngruber, 2017;
van Leeuwen & van der Spek, 2018), while the Polanyian paradigm (particularly its
emphasis on redistribution) seems to have lost most of its former appeal and given
way to alternative economic models based on a variable combination of redistri-
bution, markets, private interests and selective interventions by the state. Another
source of inspiration derives from a revival of neo-Marxist models. Their primary
goal is to understand the circumstances that led to the emergence of capitalism and
a market economy in the West and, in so doing, to discern if this particular historical
and economic path was unique, an exception in history or if, rather, its roots are to be
found in other parts of the world, including antiquity (Anievas & Nişancıoğlu, 2015;
Banaji, 2018; Tedesco, 2018). In any case, the validity of the neo-institutional model
for the analysis of pre-modern societies is currently subject to increasing criticism,
particularly its claim that Western practices and institutional arrangements (as well
as their cognitive and behavioural foundations, such as “rationality”) are universally
valid and not rooted, instead, on very distinctive historical conditions and balances
of power among diverse actors that led, not only to the emergence of the modern
state in Europe, but also to the gradual extension of capitalism in this part of the
world (Sánchez León & Izquierdo Martín, 2002; Narotzky & Manzano, 2014).
To conclude this brief introduction, it should be noticed that the recent regain
of interest in the study of markets, enterprise, “entrepreneurship”, monetization and
economic structure in the ancient Near East has hardly influenced or inspired discus-
sions in Egyptology about the economic foundations of pharaonic Egypt and their
changes over time. Only some attempts have tried to test and/or import the neo-
institutional (Muhs, 2016) and neo-Keynesian paradigms (Warburton, 2016), but
their impact seems quite limited on (if not utterly ignored by) an otherwise tradi-
tional narrative still solidly framed by the concepts of centralization, intense state
interventionism and dominant redistributive networks, even if their actual pertinence
has been rarely discussed seriously. With these ideas in mind, I will try to explore
in the following pages the problem of the economic logic underlying the possession
and transfer of land in an attempt to challenge these assumptions and to explore
some venues of research that, I hope, may promote comparative research with other
societies of the ancient world.
120 J. C. M. García

Private Ownership of Land and the Strategies Involving Its

Possession and Management

One of the most enduring myths about the agricultural economy of ancient Egypt
states that pharaohs owned all land in Egypt. A fact that, when coupled with the
alleged interventionist and centralized nature of royal power, meant that private
ownership of land was insignificant and that, as a consequence, a market of land
in which private tenants bought and sold plots was simply absent. Furthermore, the
all-encompassing redistributive economic organization supposedly implemented by
the pharaohs also meant that pharaohs cared for the welfare of their subjects, covered
their needs and that, under these conditions, private economic transactions (including
those related to the use and transfer of land) were reduced to very modest exchanges
in the domestic sphere between individuals and households. So, private transactions
on land could only involve the transfer of rights over these fields as the king (and,
secondarily, the institutions he controlled) always remained the eminent/effective
owner of the fields exchanged. In this perspective, most of the Egyptian population
would have consisted of a mass of poor peasants hardly able at all to purchase land
(Baer, 1962).
Against such idealized depictions (see also Manning, 2003: 193–197) I would
like to argue that the term peasantry covered in fact quite diverse conditions, from
poor agricultural workers who cultivated the fields of other people and institutions
to wealthy or, at least, affluent tenants capable to manage a substantial portfolio
of landed assets including their own land, fields leased from other tenants as well
as plots belonging to institutions such as temples or the crown (Moreno García,
2014b). As the private archive of Heqanakhte—a wealthy landowner who lived at
the beginning of the second millennium BCE—shows, the letters he addressed to
his subordinates contain very precise instructions about the management of his land
and the allocation of resources to the members of his household. What emerges from
them is that his agricultural choices were guided by purely private interests, as he
sought to obtain the best possible returns. He controlled a substantial amount of land
(at least 110–150 arouras of land or 27–37 ha), well above that usually ascribed to
an average Egyptian peasant (about 1.25 ha), as well as a sizeable cattle herd, he
employed several assistants and was also a creditor for about 25 neighbours who
owed him grain. In his search for profit, he did not doubt to lease additional land
from wealthy neighbours, a strategy that in all probability also intended to create a
network of social relations in which he reinforced his status as local patron, accepted
by his peers as member of a local (sub-)elite (Allen, 2002).
Having this example in mind, it is perhaps significant that the earliest extensive
administrative inscription records precisely, among other dispositions, selling and
buying land. Metjen was an official who lived around 2600 BCE, and he described in
the texts of his tomb how he accumulated and managed the landed assets under his
control: “He has acquired 200 arouras (=55 ha) of land from many royal colonists.
He has given 50 arouras of land to (his) mother Nebesneit when she set up her will
for the children, and their share was set down in a royal document for every office”
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 121

(Strudwick, 2005: 192). Another passage mentions again that “he has acquired 200
arouras of land from many royal colonists”, and refers as well to the acquisition of
two orchards and the inheritance of some property from his father: “a walled estate
200 cubits long and 200 broad, set out with fine trees, and a large pool made in
it; it was planted with fig trees and vines. It is written down in a royal document,
and their names are (recorded likewise) on (this) royal document. The trees and the
vines were planted in great numbers, and the wine therefrom was produced in great
quantity (or ‘of great quality’). A garden was made for him on land of 1 kha and 2
ta within the enclosure, which was planted with trees. (They were called) Iymeres, a
‘foundation of Metjen,’ and Iatsobek, a ‘foundation of Metjen.’ The property of his
father the judge and scribe Inpuemankh was given to him, without wheat and barley
and the property of the house, but with dependents and herds of donkeys and pigs
(?)” (Strudwick, 2005: 193). Finally, Metjen obtained other fields as remuneration
for specific administrative duties he accomplished for the crown. Whereas the precise
“legal” circumstances involved in these transactions are not indicated, the texts are
exceptional in which they refer in detail to the diverse categories of land in possession
of a high official: rewards for administrative duties, private acquisitions and, finally,
property inherited from his father. That he made use freely of this property also
transpires from the land he transferred to his mother (50 arouras) in order she provided
for other sons (Strudwick, 2005: 192). In this case, the references to “shares” of the
field did not normally describe physical division into separate plots of land, but
rights to land for cultivation––which often meant rights to lease land––and claims
to income from a proportional share of the crop (Eyre, 2013: 171). The inscription
of Metjen appears thus as one of the rare examples in which an official describes in
detail the formation, composition and disposal of his patrimony. Similar conditions
are discernible in the will of prince Nykaure (late twenty-sixth century BCE), who
enumerates fourteen agricultural domains spread in several provinces in Middle
Egypt and the Delta and bequeathed to several members of his family (Strudwick,
2005: 200).
Despite the very scarce textual evidence about private transfers of real estate
that has survived from the third millennium BCE, there are also examples in
which individuals acquired houses (Strudwick, 2005: 185–186, 205–206) and tombs
(Strudwick, 2005: 204), and that these transactions involved the use of sealed docu-
ments to validate the sales. Some statements in the tombs of dignitaries and offi-
cials also refer to transactions and acquisitions of wealth outside the circuit of royal
rewards, particularly to payments to the artists and craftsmen who built and deco-
rated the tombs (Strudwick, 2005: 251–260). These inscriptions stress in fact that it
was the owner of the tomb who paid the artisans with his own property, without any
intervention of the king. One of the most detailed is that of Remenuka at Giza, dating
from the 6th dynasty (2345–2181 BCE): “this tomb was made for me in exchange
of bread and beer which I gave to the workmen who made this tomb. For indeed I
have given to them a large payment of all sorts of linen which they requested and
they thanked god for it” (Strudwick, 2005: 257). Another example comes from the
tomb of Akhetmehu at Giza, also dated from the 6th dynasty: “with regard to this
my tomb of eternity, it was made for bread and beer; every workman who worked
122 J. C. M. García

on it thanked all the gods for me. I gave them clothing, oil, copper and grain in great
quantity” (Strudwick, 2005: 252). It seems then that metals (especially copper),
cloth and, obviously, grain were not only part of the wealth owned by individuals,
but also commodities freely used as “currency” for payments. An inscription from
Giza confirms this use as it mentions a house that was sold in exchange for a prize
evaluated in ten shat-units but actually paid with several pieces of furniture and
cloth: “one piece of four-measure cloth: 3 shat; one wooden bed: 4 shat; one piece
of two-measure cloth: 3 shat” (Strudwick, 2005: 205–206).
It is apparent then that real estate was bought and sold in the course of purely
private transactions since an early date, that they involved what can be called very
loosely “contracts” (or sealed documents), and that a world of private affairs—still
poorly known—coexisted alongside the redistributive circuits controlled by the royal
palace. One can evoke, for instance, a famous market scene represented in a tomb of
Saqqara (late twenty-fifth century BCE). There, a man appears measuring out cloth
by the cubit from a bale held by a second man, with the caption “(a?) cubit of cloth for
6,5 shat (=7.36 gr, perhaps of copper)” (Eyre, 1998: 179). In this sphere of exchanges,
use of abstract units of measure and private affairs, it was not uncommon that land
be evoked in some inscription as a commodity subject to similar operations of sale
and purchase. The sudden recurrence in many private inscriptions following the end
of the monarchy (ca. 2160 BCE) of themes such as indebtedness, loss of property
(including members of the vendor’s household, reduced to serfdom), acquisition of
fields and praise of economic autonomy, points to the importance of the acquisition
of land in the strategies of some members of the local sub-elites. Until 2160 BCE it
was exceptional that officials mentioned at all the accumulation of wealth outside the
circuits of rewards and remunerations awarded by the king. But with the end of the
monarchy and the crisis of the palatial culture that followed, the dominant cultural
codes (which restricted any mention to private sources of income) lost their former
predominance. It was then that private inscriptions began to express new, alternative
social values. Personal initiative, economic autonomy and accumulation of wealth
became some of the most praised. The counterpart is that the sources of this period of
the political division of Egypt (2160–2050 BCE) also evoke the dangers that hanged
over private patrimonies. Indebtedness, conflicts around inheritances and the trans-
mission of family assets, economic hardship and abuses from powerful potentates
appear as the main challenges that put at risk the transmission of patrimonies, so the
continuity of “the house of the father” became a major concern in the inscriptions
of this period (Moreno García, 2000, 2015, 2016a). A fascinating set of texts called
“letters to the dead” contain, precisely, pleas addressed to dead people by their living
relatives in order to request their help face difficulties. A good example is the letter
addressed by Shepsi to his deceased father Iyenkhenmut, dealing with the loss of
Shepsi’s fields because of the debts run up by his brother and never repaid (Willems,
1991; Strudwick, 2005: 183). In other cases, conflicts erupted because of divorces
(and the subsequent disputes between former wives over the inheritance of the goods
of their deceased husband), about succession to authority over a family between the
tutor appointed by a deceased official and the son of the latter, in challenge to a
written claim (Strudwick, 2005: 186–187; Eyre, 2013: 103–104), etc.
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 123

However, harsh conditions for some also created opportunities for personal enrich-
ment and, consequently, others profited from distress to acquire land, people and
property and to enhance their social status. That is why so many private inscriptions
from the period between 2160 and 2050 BCE, when no central monarchy ruled over
Egypt, refer to these circumstances. On the one hand, individuals proudly evoke that
they had obtained their wealth thanks only to their own effort and, what is more,
that they had also succeeded in preserving the “house of the father” intact; then they
passed it on to the next generation, sometimes even enlarged and enriched (Moreno
García, 1997: 32–45). On the other hand, they also boasted about acquiring presti-
gious possessions like fields, serfs, boats and cattle (Moreno García, 2000). Finally,
there are many cases in which they rhetorically claimed that they had never enslaved
a girl or deprived a man of his property in periods of distress and famine. In these
cases, it was not rare that the monuments of such individuals were inscribed with
meticulous enumerations of the property acquired by their own initiative, as in the
case of the army commander Nuy: “I acquired 40 people, 54 bulls, 36 asses, 260
goats, 3 imu-ships and 6 depet-ships. (Furthermore,) I have bought (by contract?)
20 kha of fields [=about 50 ha] as well as (several) houses. (Finally,) I have dug
a pool and planted 40 sycamores, and I did all that in excess of the goods of my
father” (Musacchio, 2010). The stela of another official, Heqaib, who lived in the
area of Thebes, epitomizes the new ideals so valued in the private inscriptions of
this period: “I was an excellent ‘modest one’, speaking with his mouth and acting
with his arm, who makes his town keep at a distance from him. I was a noble one in
Thebes, a great pillar in the southern district. I surpassed every peer of mine in this
city in respect of riches of every kind. So people said, when I was acting by my (own)
arm: ‘[he is] one that is free from robbing another.’ I provided this whole city with
Upper Egyptian barley for many(?) years, not to speak of the […]. I gave bread to the
hungry and clothes to the naked. I did not calumniate the great ones and I gave ease
to the ‘modest ones’. I gave a loan of corn (?) to Upper Egypt and Upper Egyptian
barley to this northern district. I also gave oil to the province of Elkab after my town
had been satisfied. I made a ship of forty (cubits) and a bark, for transporting cattle
and for ferrying him who had no boat in the season of inundation. I appointed a
herdsman to (my) cattle and (further) herdsmen to (my) goats and to (my) donkeys.
My people were more numerous and my precious goods were greater in number
than those of any peer of mine. I was a (real) master of my heart in times of turmoil,
while everybody else was shutting his door. When the ruler counted my cattle, he
found that my possessions had increased. As for everyone that had to deal with me,
I caused him to bend his arm” (Morenz, 2006; Polotsky, 1930). Acting by oneself,
according with his own initiatives, needs and expectations, without following the
instructions of others (including the king), accumulating substantial wealth thanks
to his own deeds, not to be matched by his peers, and sharing his prosperity and
good counsils with neighbours and fellow citizens, especially in periods of turmoil
and famine, convey the new ideal of the prosperous self-made man (Moreno García,
1997: 1–87).
Unfortunately, precise data about the amount of land bought (not to speak of prices
paid) are very rare, but it seems that it could be quite substantial. A Nubian soldier
124 J. C. M. García

proclaimed that he had obtained a field of 23 arouras (about 6.3 ha); a resident
at the locality of Dendera bought a field of five kha (that is to say, 50 arouras,
about 13.7 ha); Nuy, a chief of the army from this same locality, got 20 kha (that
is to say 200 arouras, about 55 ha), while in several other instances an individual
simply asserts that he had bought “a big field”; Bawi of El-Hawawish acquired many
people as well as many fields and another contemporary, Beb, proudly declared
that he had acquired four fields. In some of these cases, the inscriptions precise
that the acquisition took the form of a (sealed) contract (Moreno García, 2000). Of
course, these texts may simply refer to a practice that had been usual for centuries
but never evoked in previous periods because of considerations of decorum and
etiquette, when only royal endowments were considered worth recording in private
inscriptions. Nevertheless, these considerable purchases of land (a field of 1.25 ha
could support a standard Egyptian family), and the fact that they were inscribed
on prestigious expensive monuments, reveal that the purchasers were not simple
peasants but members of a local sub-elite with (easy?) access to land. The “letter
to the dead” of Shepsi, mentioned previously, seems to correspond to a different
social background. According to this document, an unreimbursed debt evaluated
in 144 litters of barley (approximately two khar “sacks”, an Egyptian measure of
volume), led to the seizure of Shepsi’s fields. This quantity of grain corresponds to
the standard yield expected from a field of only 0.2–0.4 arouras (0.05–0.11 ha), so
Shepsi apparently belonged to a social sector more modest than that of the purchasers
mentioned before. Finally, the papyrus Brooklyn 16.205 (around 770 BCE), deals
with the acquisition of several plots of land made by a certain Ikeni in a year of hard
times. The plots were quite small (in three cases hardly more than half an aroura)
and in several cases, they are described as located next to “the well of Ikeni” (Parker,
1962: 49–52). It seems as if Ikeni had followed a calculated strategy of purchase,
seeking to acquire plots around a well that bore his own name or that of a member
of his kin, even an ancestor. Given the small surface of the tenures, it is possible that
they were devoted to horticultural production instead of the cultivation of cereals.
Once again, bad times for some meant that they were forced to sell land and that
others profited from their misfortunes to build a portfolio of landed assets.
A final intriguing point concerns the use of gold in private acquisitions of land.
A common assumption about the Egyptian economy (and its alleged redistributive
basis) was that any (pre-)monetary use of precious metals was unnecessary and that,
accordingly, the role of market-oriented and profit-seeking production was irrelevant.
These assertions are nevertheless problematic (Moreno García, 2016b). Fishermen,
for instance, paid their taxes in silver according to several documents from the late
second and early first millennium BCE, and the sums they delivered were in some
cases quite substantial, so they probably sold their captures in markets where precious
metals circulated and were exchanged for other goods. Even the army (or at least
a fortress commander) shelled out huge amounts of silver to obtain supplies such
as fish and wool in the late second millennium BCE (Wente, 1990: 120–121). In
fact, gold and copper were already part of the wealth accumulated and stocked by
officials of modest status around 2100 BCE: “[I surpassed everyone who was and]
who will exist therein in people, Lower Egyptian grain and emmer, gold, copper,
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 125

clothing, oil, [honey], … [cattle], goats, cargo ships and everything” (Fischer, 1968:
160). And one of the potential uses of the precious metals thus accumulated was to
acquire land. A soldier from Edfu, Ha-ankhef (ca. 1550 BCE), returned from Nubia
after having obtained 26 pieces of gold and a servant girl as payment for his military
services for six years. He invested then this wealth in the purchase of three plots of
land, one for himself, another for his wife and the last one for his children (Redford,
1997: 12). Penone, a sandal maker who lived in the Ramesside period, acquired
17 nbyw (?) of land in exchange for gold (Hassan & Ouda, 2018: 100). As for the
famous robberies of the late New Kingdom, when huge amounts of silver and gold
were stolen from temples and royal tombs, the documents of the trials reveal that
the robbers used the booty for the acquisition, among other goods, of fields, slaves,
grain and cattle, usually through the mediation of merchants (Peet, 1930: 118, 144,
149, 152, 157). Thus the overseer of the field of the temple of Amun, Akhenmenu,
received 1 deben of silver (=91 gr) and 5 kite of gold (=45.5 gr) “in exchange for land”,
while the scribe Amenhotep “called Seret”, of the temple of Amun, received 2 deben
(=182 gr of silver) “in exchange for land”, for 40 deben of copper and for 10 sacks of
barley (Peet, 1930: 144; the ratio silver-copper at this time was 1:60). That enormous
quantities of precious metals could be laundered in this way and, what is more, easily
exchanged for modest amounts of common goods, means that their circulation, as
well as the activities of traders, were far less rare than previously assumed in the
local sphere and even among people of modest condition (Moreno García, 2014a,
2014b, 2016b). This may also explain why three tenants who cultivated some royal
land assigned to a temple during this period are said to have paid their taxes in gold
directly into the Pharaoh’s treasury (Wente, 1990: 130–131).

Temple Land and Private Strategies

In other instances, transactions on land appear rather more ambiguous as they refer
not necessarily to private property but to fields that belonged to temples and the crown.
The tenants could buy, sell and transfer by inheritance their rights over their land
and this possibility enabled people of some status to build and manage substantial
land portfolios for their own profit, including members of the royal family (Moreno
García, 2016c). Since the middle of the third millennium BCE, and particularly since
1550 BCE, temples became crucial institutions as providers of substantial income to
the elites of the kingdom, both central and provincial. Their symbolic and economic
importance put into the hands of kings a powerful tool to rally local chiefs and
potentates to their authority, to reward dignitaries and agents of the crown (including
the military) and to interfere in local affairs through donations of land that benefited
selected members of the local elite. As for the families and potentates with access to
this source of wealth, prestige and useful contacts with the royal palace, the income
they obtained from temples (as priests, managers of temple property, beneficiaries
of rewards, etc.) provided them with institutional and economic security on the long
term. This land escaped indeed from the uncertainties brought by divisions of property
126 J. C. M. García

(inheritances, divorces and family disputes) and from utter interference by other
members of their kin and opened the possibility to develop individual strategies for
them and for their direct descendants (Moreno García, 2013a).
Such conflicts are well documented from documents of all periods. Perhaps the
best known is the dispute over a land grant to the naval officer Neshi in the reign
of Ahmose (1550–1525 BCE). It had been run as an undivided family holding for
centuries, but then been the subject of repeated dispute since the reign of Akhenaten
(1352–1336 BCE). Later on, during the reign of Ramesses II (1279–1213 BCE),
the dispute opposed a certain Khay on one side, to a lady Werel, her son Huy, his
wife Nubnefer and their son Mose on the other. Mose’s father had managed the
estate, but control had then fallen into the hands of Khay. A court was constituted
to study their claims and judge between them, and each party presented documents
to support their positions (Eyre, 2013: 155–162). As Eyre has pointed out, “the
core of the dispute was a breakdown of relations within an extended family over
shares in agricultural land: originally a royal donation to reward the high-ranking
military officer Neshi. Although it is not made explicit here, such endowments were
characteristically inalienable and indivisible grants, to be inherited in a single line:
‘son to son, heir to heir, for ever’. The testimony is partial and incomplete, but the
best guess is that by the reign of Horemheb [1323–1295 BCE] a direct male line of
succession had broken down, and that those members of the family who retained an
interest were split in their opinions: whether it should remain as a unit or a clean
division be made; if undivided, who should act as ‘representative’ for the ‘brothers’
(a term that includes siblings and cousins of both sexes); and who actually qualified
as a brother, and was therefore entitled to share in the income from the land” (Eyre,
2013: 157). In other cases, “preventive” dispositions forbade that the goods affected
to the mortuary cult of an official (and the income derived from it) were unduly
appropriated by his kin, as the “legitimate” beneficiaries were the ritualists supposed
to perform the ceremonies and/or his direct descendants (Strudwick, 2005: 185–207;
Moreno García, 2013a).
Temple land, in principle, was (ideally) put under the protection of a god as it
was part of his house(hold), it was (ideally) inviolable, and it increased thanks to
donations, mostly royal. A kind of virtuous procedure made it possible for kings
to transfer royal land to temples, both in the provinces as well as around the main
cities of Egypt (Moreno García, 2013b). Then, this land was partly cultivated by
tenants according to diverse modalities (compulsory work, leases, domains trusted
to agricultural “entrepreneurs”, etc.), partly granted to people of a certain status
connected to sanctuaries in different ways, from priests to people that performed
occasional rituals in exchange for revenue, from military personnel and administra-
tors to potentates and dignitaries who received substantial fields as rewards from the
king (Eyre, 1997; Katary, 2012; Moreno García, 2016c). The status of the fields thus
granted varied significantly and inspired complex strategies of accumulation and use
of temple land that cannot be reduced to the mere usufruct of the fields. For these
reasons, temples appear as true “elite-building tools” in the hands of kings, an aspect
often emphasized in both royal and private inscriptions: the high steward Amenhotep
declared that the king had built a new temple close to Memphis, endowed it with fields
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 127

and appointed priests and prophets from the children of the notables of Memphis
(Moreno García, 2013b). In other cases, personal initiatives pursued the same goal:
the priest Merenptah stated before the great court of Heliopolis that he had placed
a statue of Ramesses III in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, equipped with ritual
personnel and offerings; the court approved his measure as well as his appointments
(which included Merenptah himself as main authority of the cult “from son to son,
heir to heir”, a sister and two other persons) and assigned offerings brought from the
treasury of Ptah and the royal treasury. Royal statues placed in temples, endowed
with fields (usually belonging to the category of “donation-fields”), offerings, cattle
and other sources of income, were central in these strategies, and rent was paid to
the possessor, as papyrus Wilbour and papyrus Golenischeff 1116A show (Moreno
García, 2013a, 2013b). In this vein, Sataimau of Edfu claimed that king Ahmose
(1550–1525 BCE) had appointed him second lector-priest in the temple of Horus
and had granted him the income from a royal statue in the sanctuary endowed with
about 36 arouras as well as many offerings (Davies, 2009: 34–36). Inversely, mere
scribes and craftsmen (Fischer-Elfert, 2012; Hovestreydt, 1997) and high dignitaries
alike made donations to royal statues and, in return, they were allowed to share in
the god’s offerings presented to the royal image or obtained rewards from the king
and thus became associated to his retinue. Hence several fragments of an inscription
found in the tomb of Wenennefer, a high priest of Osiris in Abydos, record many
royal statues erected (?) in the years 21, 33, 30 + x, 38, 39 and 40 of Ramesses II and
endowed with offerings of wine and milk as well as with substantial amounts of land
(30 arouras in one case: Moreno García, 2013d: 1038). This policy recalls similar
claims from other members of the Ramesside elite, like Penniut of Aniba (Frood,
2007: 213–218). In these cases, private donations of land were often followed, in
return, either by offerings from the king’s monuments or by authorization to control
and derive an income from the endowment (a privilege which continued under the
heirs of the donor). In both cases, the donor ensured that the goods donated remained
in some way under his control by specifying that the goods transferred to a temple
or to a royal statue were protected from outside interference.
In other examples, some tenants enjoyed considerable rights over the temple fields
they possessed. A decree from the temple of Medamud, for instance, refers to the
reorganization of its patrimony by a Theban king in the early sixteenth century BCE.
The text mentions, on the one hand, the donation of fields for an amount of 39 arouras
(10.7 ha) to the local temple of god Montu and, on the other hand, the reorganization
of its entire landed patrimony (about 460 ha), with a particular clause: “as for anything
therein which is in the possession of holders of endowments, make compensation for
that [which is to be compen]sated for [on these] fields, plot for plot, threshing-floor
[for threshing-floor, with respect to] this endowment of (god) Montu in Medamud.
Those who are among the numerous holders of endowments […]” (Redford, 1997:
8). This very particular category of field is mentioned again in an administrative text
known as the Duties of the Vizier (earliest versions from the middle-late fifteenth
century BCE). According to this composition, one of the tasks of the vizier was
described in these terms: “it is he who makes the endowment with every plot of land.
As for any petitioner who says: ‘our boundaries are moved’, then one shall inspect
128 J. C. M. García

that (i. e. whether) they (the boundaries) are under the seal of officials. If so, then he
will take away the plots of the particular council which moved them (the boundaries)”
(Van den Boorn, 1988: 185). From these texts, it appears that some people benefited
from a particular category of endowment and that kings and local authorities (either
temple overseers or local dignitaries) could not simply take away this land from their
possessors, as they were at least to receive some compensation.
These measures made it possible for kings to get the support of local authorities and
to build a provincial social basis formed by people loyal to their authority, sometimes
of relative modest condition. In both cases grants of temple land were crucial. From
the numerous donations of land recorded in the royal annals of the Early and Middle
Bronze Age to the massive grants of fields, gardens, cattle and workers celebrated
in the inscriptions and papyri monuments of the Late Bronze Age, temples provided
kings with a powerful tool that helped guarantee that the interests of the highest elite of
the kingdom and of a provincial “middle class” coincided with those of the sovereign.
The Wilbour papyrus gives a detailed clue about what such social base of the pharaohs
in the provinces may look like (Antoine, 2014; Katary, 1999, 2010). This document
records more than three thousand plots, scattered over a stretch of 140 km in the Nile
Valley around the Fayum and the adjacent southern area. Most of these plots (around
2800) are accompanied by the name of their possessors and their social position (titles,
functions, etc.). It thus emerges a world of small tenants made of priests, women of
a certain status, modest landowners, soldiers and military personnel, scribes, etc.
The size of the allotments varied substantially, but the basic plot consisted of 3 or 5
arouras, and multiples of this amount were granted according to the rank, function
and activities of their beneficiaries. Only in a very reduced number of cases (thirty-
seven) does this document record “donation fields”, but they were correlated with the
funerary cults of Ramesses III and Ramesses V and with royal institutions, they were
mainly located around the locality of Sharope (where many military personnel lived),
and they seem related to royal statues endowed with fields. In general, the private
possessors of the holdings recorded in the papyrus paid a “tax” or management fee
to the administering institution on a variable, but usually minuscule, portion of their
fields at a fixed rate per aroura. These smallholdings entailed rights of access to the
land provided that their possessors honoured the institution’s harvest claim. A study
of the roster of smallholders indicates that there are more than 160 instances of split
holding (a smallholder possessing more than one plot), comprising approximately
400 plots. Split holdings occur most often with high-ranking individuals, but most of
the smallholders with more than one plot, however, were ordinary people identified
as prophets, priests, soldiers and scribes. Thus, split holding was a significant element
of land tenure on institutionally administered domains even though the percentage
of the total plots is modest (Katary, 2000, 2001). When considering that the southern
area covered by the papyrus lacks any significant historical and administrative source
for the previous centuries, it seems that the pharaohs promoted an active policy of
agricultural colonization of this region accompanied by the incorporation of the local
elites. Temples were crucial as managerial and economic institutions in this process.
The opportunities for local promotion for those with access to temple holdings
were considerable. In fact, wealthy peasants played quite often the role of private
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 129

“entrepreneurs” at the service of the temples, as they cultivated substantial tracts

of land (referred to as “domains”), up to 200 arouras (or 55 ha) according to the
papyrus Wilbours. Then they delivered part of the harvest to the institution owner
of the land, between one-fourth and one-third. The best-known category of such
“entrepreneurs” was called ihuty (Moreno García, 2016c: 228–232). The ihuty were
depicted in many literary texts as leading a miserable existence, prone to abuses by
superiors and afflicted by bad harvests, pests, excessive taxes, etc. But in real life,
their condition was quite diverse, from serfs forced to cultivate standard plots of 20
arouras (5.5 ha) and deliver 200 sacks of grain (one sack being equivalent to 76.8 L)
to ihuty capable to deliver more than a thousand sacks. One of them, for instance,
handed over 1421 sacks in several villages, and this gives an approximate insight
into the geographical extent of his interests and his capacity to mobilize manpower
in order to cultivate the land required (Gardiner, 1941: 56–58). This case was far
from unique. As the interests of such wealthy ihuty extended over entire districts,
they can be defined as local potentates. In such a role appears another ihuty, called
Patjauemdiamun, involved in an obscure affair of stolen tunics and found guilty by an
image of god Amun at a village near Thebes. He challenged this divine decision and
took his case to other oracles in nearby villages hoping to have finally a favourable
decision before “the people of the villages.” The fact that such decisions were taken
at several localities and involved many witnesses as well as his companions and
members of his personnel, suggests that he enjoyed a high status in the local sphere
(Kitchen, 2014: 236–237). A final example of the importance of temple land in the
social and economic strategies developed by rich peasants is described in a late
demotic literary composition. There a potentate (lit. a “great man”) was also a priest
in the local temple. This was a profitable source of income for him, as he obtained part
of the agricultural income of the sanctuary because of his condition as a priest and,
in addition, he also exploited some fields of the temple as a cultivator in exchange
for a part of the harvest; the considerable wealth thus amassed allowed him to pay
wages to the personnel of the temple, who were thus considered his clients (the text
states that he had “acquired” them) and he could even marry his sons and daughters to
priests and potentates (lit. “great men”) of another town (Tait, 2008–2009: 115–124).
These examples reveal that temple land was a crucial asset in the composition of
the patrimonies not only of the elite but also of moderately wealthy people, including
the upper strata of the peasantry as well as scribes. The late second millennium BCE
scribe Thutmose is a good example in which holding land, whether institutional or
private, was a familial affair involving him and his son (Antoine, 2015). He owned two
categories of land, one which explicitly belonged to him and his son (“our own land”),
the administrative status thereof being difficult to identify (were these privately held
fields on temple land, or simply private property?), and the other which quite prob-
ably consisted of estates pertaining to temples or secular institutions. Holding those
two types of the fields was a sign of social prestige that confirmed Thutmose’s high
rank but, as in the case of another well-off tenant, Heqanakhte, who lived in the
early second millennium BCE, the administrative or juridical nature of these fields
was a secondary concern: his main goal was managing the land so as to obtain the
best agricultural yield (Allen, 2002). Both Heqanakhte and Thutmose behaved like
130 J. C. M. García

managerial landlords, closely watching over all the details of agricultural operations,
and they were certainly not absentee landlords, who delegated the management of
their fields to subordinates preoccupied only with the revenue generated. Their inter-
ests extended over a district and, in the case of Thutmose, his letters refer to grain
stored in magazines in several villages, thus suggesting that other cultivators living
nearby worked the estate alongside household members. In fact, the men labouring
in the fields were perceived as having the same level of importance as his son and his
family, as if they were part of his household. Links with temples also emerge in one
of his letters, in which Thutmose mentions chariot-pulling donkeys that, apparently,
belonged to a temple (Antoine, 2015). A papyrus scroll recently discovered records
his financial accounts relating to the acquisition of copper tools and weapons, but
also private affairs like an inventory of his amulets and jewellery and a report about
the robbery of his personal belongings (Hölzl et al., 2018). Other examples of people
of relative modest condition but involved in different business, including leasing land
from temples and getting income from it, are the middle first-millennium choachytes
(ritualists who took care of mummies in exchange for a remuneration) Djekhy (and his
son) and Tsenhor (Donker van Heel, 2012, 2014). They accumulated priestly and/or
administrative functions, alongside their agricultural affairs, and reveal a sector of the
Egyptian society of this period in which the lines between peasantry and officialdom
had become blurred.
A final word concerns some categories of tenants usually labelled “free tenants”.
They possessed temple land but (usually) not as holders of administrative or priestly
positions and, apparently, not as beneficiaries of royal awards. The problem becomes
even more controversial because it was common that officials and priests held in
fact plots defined as “fields of free tenants”. So, the central question seems more
related to the categorization of a very specific type of land tenure than to the actual
social position of its holders. The term nemeh is an excellent example of these
problems (Moreno García, 2016c: 232–239). It designated originally the orphan,
but its semantic field became gradually enlarged to encompassed further meanings,
principally people who led an autonomous existence, based in the possession and
management of their own land and whose means of subsistence, consequently, were
independent of any service to other landholders, to institutions such as temples and
royal departments and to the crown but subject, nevertheless, to state taxes (from the
beginning of the New Kingdom). By the end of the New Kingdom, a new expression
appeared, “field of nemeh”, both in administrative texts and in documents dealing
with the management of fields belonging to temples, the royal family and the members
of the elite. The expression “field of nemeh” appeared for the first time around 1280
BCE, not in Egypt but in Nubia, then under Egyptian control, and it was not until two
centuries later that it began to be attested in inscriptions and administrative papyri
from Upper Egypt. The earliest attestations reveal that the “fields of nemeh” bordered
fields of the king, of members of the royal family or of dignitaries. It appears then
that “fields of nemeh” were probably held by local potentates, bearing no rank or
function title, but enjoying a certain wealth and status. This may explain why “fields
of nemeh” are so scarce in Ramesside and in later land registers, as if they were a
special kind of tenure used by kings as a selective tool to honour and co-opt certain
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 131

individuals. Seen in this light, similar conditions prevailed when nemeh involved
in agricultural activities and “fields of nemeh” appeared for the first time in Egypt
properly.
In a letter from Elephantine, dated from the eleventh century BCE (Wente, 1990:
130–131), the mayor of Elephantine informed his superiors about a field of the crown
regularly tilled by some nemeh/free tenants who paid rent or tax in gold directly to
the treasury of the Pharaoh while he, on the contrary, paid in grain (100 sacks) to
the scribe of a temple for some temple land he cultivated near Kom Ombo, close to
Elephantine. The fact that these nemeh/free tenants owned gold and paid with it their
taxes or rent points to their well-off condition. Other documents, also dated from the
eleventh century BCE, introduce for the first time the expression “fields of nemeh”
(Gasse, 1988: 13, 37–38, 97, 105, 213–214). But even in these administrative land
registers references to “fields of nemeh” are very rare when compared with other
categories of plots. For example, in papyrus Louvre AF 6345 only three plots are
so defined and, moreover, they only represented a small fraction of the extensive
agricultural domains where each of them was located: 1 + x arouras out of 800 in
the first case, 40.5 arouras out of 667 in the second and, finally, 10 arouras out of
1800 in the third, respectively.
From the beginning of the first millennium BCE references to “fields of nemeh”
become more frequent, especially in the transactions passed on between members
of the royal family and private people (Moreno García, 2016c: 232–239). This is
the case, for instance, of the funerary endowment established by Sheshonq I (945–
924 BCE) for the statue of his father in the temple of Osiris at Abydos, which
included 100 arouras of “fields of nemeh” (Ritner, 2009: 166–172). Henuttawy, sister
and wife of Smendes II, great priest of Amun, declared that she had bought some
land, including “fields of nemeh” (Ritner, 2009: 138–143), while princess Maatkare
obtained, when she was just a child, some property that she had bought as well as
“anything of any sort that the people of the land sold to her” and which was recorded
as goods of nemeh/free tenants (Ritner, 2009: 163–165). The most detailed example
is that of Iuwelot, great priest of Amun and son of king Osorkon I (924–889 BCE)
and the impressive inscription (the so-called Apanage stela). He acquired a domain
measuring 556 arouras from eighteen tenants that he bequeathed to his son; the
land, located in the domain of god Amun, was considered collectively as “fields of
nemeh”, and the stela records the surface of each plot, the different categories of land
it encompassed as well as the presence of wells and trees in it. Finally, the document
indicates the price paid for each field (Ritner, 2009: 271–278). Another high priest
of Amun, Menkheperre, bought a field from about two dozen individuals designated
as “the nemeh/free tenants of the town” (Ritner, 2009: 130–135). In other cases,
“fields of nmh.” were involved in transactions between ordinary people, as when an
inscription from 655 BCE, found near Karnak, refers to the sale or donation of a
“high field of nemeh” of 10 arouras, located in the domain of god Amun, between a
scribe and a priestess. As for papyrus Louvre E 10,935, it makes it possible to follow
the ups and downs of a “high field of nemeh” of about 5.5 ha over an extensive
period of time (628–556 BCE). Located in the domain of god Amun in the region
of Coptos, it was successively passed on to different members of the clergy and the
132 J. C. M. García

royal household, until it was finally transferred to the pious endowment established
for the mother of the ultimate buyer. A comparable situation transpires from papyrus
British Museum 10,117, dated from 542 BCE, which deals with the sale of a “high
field of nemeh” of about 8 ha located in the domain of god Amun and which had
remained in the hands of the same family for four generations, including its sale to a
third party and its later purchase by this same family again. An important aspect to
consider is that both inscriptions and papyri reveal that transactions involving “fields
of nemeh” are only attested in Upper Egypt, and this suggests that these land tenures
are closely related to very particular regional agricultural conditions (Moreno García,
2016c: 232–239).
From all these references it is possible to draw three main conclusions. First,
“fields of nemeh” were part of the landed assets of temples but they were exploited
by people entitled to make free use of their rights over this category of land, such
as selling or leasing it to a third party or bequeathing it to their heirs. Secondly,
members of the royal family and of the highest elite of the country did not hesitate
to buy this kind of fields from ordinary tenants in order to create private agricultural
domains within a cult institution (as it happened with earlier categories of temple
land discussed supra, as the decree from Medamud). Finally, their (usually) relatively
modest size coupled with the scarce references to “fields of nemeh” in the inscrip-
tions (about 150) that recorded donations of land to temples in the late second and
early first millennium BCE (Meeks, 1979), suggest that their role was very limited in
Egypt. However, their size was in many cases larger than the average tenure needed
to feed a peasant family (about 5 arouras or 1.37 ha). Finally, “fields of nemeh”
are also very rare (only one example) in the corpus of land leases dated between
700 and 400 BCE (Donker van Heel, 1995; Moreno García, 2016c: 239–246). Other
documents relative to the exploitation of temple land and privately owned fields
also lack any mention of this type of tenure. It may then be concluded that transac-
tions concerning “fields of nemeh” only involved, on the one hand, members of the
rural elite as well as small but relatively well-off landholders and, on the other hand,
temples and members of the royalty and the high priesthood of Amun. Unfortunately,
a crucial question remains unsolved: which was the origin of the “fields of nemeh”
held by temples (purchase? Cession by individuals? Royal dispositions?). A possible
explanation, based on the evidence discussed, is that individuals sold, transferred or
donated private land tenures to temples, thus formally transformed into temple land
but subject nevertheless to some restrictions. Thanks to these transactions the orig-
inal owner of the field put himself under the protection of a sanctuary, established
useful connections with a powerful institution (and its influential rulers), obtained
institutional security for his interests in the long term and assured the transmission
of the land in the hands of his direct descendants, ideally “from son to son, and
from heir to heir”, while avoiding any intrusion or claim from collateral branches
of his own extended family, as stated in the famous Apanage stela discussed supra
(Ritner, 2009: 271–278). As for the temple, it also profited from the transaction. It
expanded its wealth and social influence and the land remained firmly in its hands,
even if the rights over it could be sold, transferred or revoked. To sum up, trans-
actions involving “fields of nemeh” point more to strategies aiming to preserve the
7 Property and Markets: The Uses of Land … 133

patrimony of wealthy individuals and to enhance their social promotion than a partic-
ular modality of cultivation of institutional land. This may explain why “fields of
nemeh” flourished in Upper Egypt, at a time of the political division of the country,
of loss of the Egyptian empire (and the sources of income with went with it), and
when the domain of god Amun became the most powerful and stable institution in
Upper Egypt, the only region where “fields of nemeh” are attested (Moreno García,
2016c: 232–239).
As for Lower Egypt, it followed, apparently, a different strategy. Here “fields
of nemeh” are absent but inscriptions recording donations of land to temples are
ubiquitous from the very end of the second millennium BCE. Temples, too, were
centres of institutional stability, of agricultural wealth and of reorganization of the
local elites in northern Egypt. But instead of a single source of authority (like the
domain of god Amun in Upper Egypt), Lower Egypt, by contrast, witnessed the
emergence of a multitude of principalities. Donations of land to temples, celebrated
in numerous stelae in Lower Egypt, may thus express the desire to visualize the
prosperity of a local elite supported by temples in a dynamic and fluid society,
well integrated in the vibrant exchange networks of the Mediterranean. However, as
Donker van Heel has pointed out recently, it is quite possible that in some instances
the differences between Upper and Lower Egypt are more apparent than real. From
the study of donations of land to choachytes, he also discerns a strategy by which
people in Lower Egypt may have donated land to the temples and then the sanctuaries
transferred them to the choachytes in usufruct, just to finance the rituals they usually
performed. In this case, it is significant that temples acted as mediators in operations
between individuals (the donor and the choachyte), doubtless to provide security to
the donor (Donker van Heel, 2017–2018).

Conclusion

From the evidence analysed, it is apparent that private land tenures are well attested in
Egypt from the earliest times. The land was exchanged between individuals and made
it possible to accumulate patrimonies, but it seems nevertheless that these transactions
were limited, that their protagonists were usually wealthy or moderately wealthy
people, and that a true market of land did not exist in Egypt. Other institutions, such
as temples and domains of the crown, opened more possibilities for the creation of
landed portfolios. However, leaving aside the abundant cases of people who obtained
temple land as awards and remunerations from the king, in exchange for their services
for the crown, there is also very limited evidence about the creation and transmission
over long periods of time of (almost) private tenures located on temple land. They
represented only a small fraction of the landed assets of temples and they could be
expropriated (but their possessors should then be compensated). It is even possible
that most of these (almost) private tenures consisted in fact in fields previously
donated by individuals to the sanctuaries in exchange for specific services but, more
generally, as a strategy seeking to secure at least part of their patrimony. In all, the
134 J. C. M. García

scope of all these individualist strategies seems quite limited and reduced mostly
to transactions carried out by wealthy individuals within the sphere of institutions
(temples, crown land, royal grants of fields), with little impact outside them. What
is more, the importance of these institutions (particularly temples) in the formation
of private land portfolios meant in the end that they also limited the possibilities for
the emergence of a significant market of land and that, accordingly, the formation of
extensive private landholdings was only possible through regular access to temple
and crown land, not to land markets.

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Chapter 8
Uneven and Combined: Product
Exchange in the Mediterranean (3rd
to 2nd Millennium BCE)

Reinhard Jung

Abstract This contribution deals with goods exchange in the Mediterranean Bronze
Age by applying Marx’s commodity definition in order to better characterize the
economic aspects of that goods exchange and to understand how those aspects
affected the societies involved. In the process of commoditization, the exchange value
of products becomes distinct from their use value, and as this development typically
appears first in exchange relations between societies, the examples discussed here
refer to products exported from Cyprus and Mycenaean Greece among others. The
exchange relationships between different Mediterranean societies involved products
exhibiting a commodity character to various degrees, while showing a rough east-
west gradient in this respect. Under specific circumstances, these exchange relation-
ships led to a rapid acceleration in the development of socio-economic relationships
within societies.

Introduction

In recent years, we seem to have witnessed a growing use of economic terms borrowed
from contemporary capitalism for the description of Bronze Age economies outside
Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt—terms such as “trade,” “commodity,” “mar-
kets” (e.g. Blake, 2014: 18–19, 219–220, 227, 238; Blackwell, 2018: 513, 525;
Pullen, 2013; for the written sources referring to markets in Mesopotamia and Egypt
see Rahmstorf, 2016a: 292–294), “World System” (Sherratt, 2000),1 or even “flow of
capital” and “capital accumulation” (Iacono, 2013: 60–61, 67). More often than not
those terms are not properly or not at all defined, which seems to imply that scholars

1 On the discussions regarding the possibilities of applying or adapting Wallerstein’s world systems

approach to pre-capitalist societies and especially to 4th to 2nd millennium Mesopotamia and the
Near East, see Patterson (2003: 140–146).

R. Jung (B)
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Archaeological Institute, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: Reinhard.Jung@oeaw.ac.at

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 139

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_8
140 R. Jung

use them with the meaning they have in our current societies, though referring to
societies of the third and second millennia BCE. The task of this paper is therefore
twofold: first, to discuss basic definitions of economic terminology by reference to
the work of Karl Marx and second, to test these definitions against some examples
in the archaeological record in order to elucidate the economic character of various
aspects of product exchange during the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.

Part A—Theoretical Consideration

Value

The first question to answer is what we should understand by the term “commodity,”
Does it aid a deeper understanding of pre- and protohistoric economies to use this
term interchangeably with “exchanged product” or anything that can be exchanged
between humans, as we read in many papers (cf. Kopytoff, 1986: 71–72)?
Karl Marx in his Kapital, vol. I, established that a dual nature is the defining
characteristic of a commodity. A commodity has both a use value and an exchange
value. First, it is a “thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or
another” (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 49). “The utility of a thing makes it a use value” (Marx,
1962 [1867]: 50). Second, the exchange value of a commodity depends on labor, but
not in the way it does in classical economic theory. The value of a commodity is
determined by “abstract human labor” measured in time units. This time is that
which has to be spent on average in a given society under normal conditions of
production and by normal intensity of work and skillfulness of the workman, in
order to produce an average specimen of a specific commodity (Marx, 1962 [1867]:
53–54). In conclusion, not every product is a commodity. A commodity is a useful
thing produced in order to be exchanged against other commodities on the basis of
their exchange values.
Marx carefully studied pre-capitalist societies by reading written sources from
many different periods and regions of the world, and he came to the conclusion that
commodities are not confined to contemporary capitalism, but existed even on “the
basis of the primitive community, of slave production, of small peasant [production]”
(Marx, 1964 [1894]: 337). However, “Before capitalist production, a large part of
the products was not produced as commodities, not to serve as commodities; while,
conversely, a large part of the products […] did not enter the production process as
commodities. The conversion of products into commodities only occurs at individual
points, is limited only to the surplus of production, or only to individual spheres of
production (the products of manufacture), etc.” (Marx, 2009 [1863/1864]: 25).
The anthropologist David Graeber, by contrast, suggested limiting the application
of the categories “use value” and “exchange value” to capitalist societies (Graeber,
2001: 264). In a more recent paper, the economist Riccardo Bellofiore refers to
critics of Marx’s labor theory of value, who argue that “Marx himself shows that the
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 141

social equalization among labors is achieved only when commodities are actually
sold in circulation: before that, in production, we meet only concrete labors, which
are heterogeneous and non-additive.” Bellofiore responds by explaining that such
positions “ignore the fact that for Marx, commodity exchange is universal only when
the capitalist mode of production is dominant — that is, only when workers are
compelled to sell their labor power to money as capital, as self-valorizing value”
(Bellofiore, 2018).
Considering these points of critique, we can point out that among the pre-capitalist
modes of production, the bureaucratic monarchies of the so-called Asiatic Mode
of Production (on that Marxian concept in reference to Near Eastern societies of
the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE see Zaccagnini, 1981; on the research history see
Nippel, 2020), did assess the value of labor in very direct ways, i.e., without the
commodity fetish of capitalist production. So, for instance, Piotr Steinkeller (2015),
in his introduction to the volume “Labor in the Ancient World,” has remarked on
the fact that around 2400 BCE the Sumerians were already thinking about human
labor in abstract terms. As he explained, “… the Sumerian word á, whose basic and
original meanings are ‘arm, strength, power, physical exertion,’ signified ‘labor’ in
exactly the same way we understand it today, namely, a quantifiable physical effort
resulting in the creation of goods and services. The Sumerians measured labor in
the units of time (days) needed by an average grown man to complete a particular
task.” Moreover, the administrators were hiring workers from other institutions and
neighboring provinces. In these transactions, the value of the labor was expressed
in units of grain or even silver. This did not happen on a free labor market as in
capitalist societies, but remained under state control (Steinkeller, 2015: 1–2, 20–21
n. 44; 23–24). This practice of counting labor in work days or man-days, themselves
converted into grain units, was developed for managing and planning purposes by
the early state administration in Mesopotamia and brings us surprisingly close to the
“socially necessary labor” of Marx’s exchange value concept.
In the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palace regimes, the basis of calculation for
the dependent work force of the palaces is not average time, but food rations were
given out according to gender categories for adults and to age categories (independent
of gender) for child workers, as classified by the administrators—a practice which
was also used in Mesopotamia from the 3rd millennium BCE (Milani, 1977; Nosch,
2020). These rations are the foodstuffs needed to sustain labor power (i.e., to keep
alive the work forces for an envisaged working period), which those administrators
used to plan work projects. In other words, the most important aspect determining
the value of the labor of those workers (cf. Marx, 1962 [1867]: 184–187) is directly
registered in this way (housing and clothes not being registered).
Thus, either registering the average personal labor, which is equivalent to the
production time for the goods necessary to reproduce the workforce, or, alterna-
tively, listing those subsistence goods themselves would have enabled the bureau-
crats of those palace- and temple-based economies to calculate the surplus labor
of the workers—i.e., that part of their daily labor time during which they would
have produced new goods to the exclusive benefit of the rulers (Marx, 1962 [1867]:
249–250; on surplus labor in precapitalist economies). We can therefore expect the
142 R. Jung

administrators to have been well informed about the labor expenditure needed in the
production of goods that either went into consumption, distribution, or exchange.
Returning to the subject of exchange value, Marx found that the more regular an
exchange relationship becomes, the more products tend to be produced in order to be
exchanged. Therefore, a separation starts to occur between the utility of the product
for consumption and its utility for exchange purposes—i.e., its use value becomes
distinguished from its exchange value. Furthermore, the quantitative proportions, in
which commodities are exchanged against each other, become directly dependent on
their production. “Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes” (Marx,
1962 [1867]: 103).
Much research in social anthropology, archaeology, and history clarified a wide
variety of ways in which human societies ascribe value to the things their members
appropriate from nature (Graeber, 2001). In a Marxist reading, all the culturally
and ideologically determined categories of value—such as those of the famous kula
exchange system for example—appear as specific expressions of use value. Once
products obtained by exchange between societies enter distribution and consumption
processes in one society, its members imbue them with value according to the social
rules and traditions of their own society and then exchange them further or remove
them from circulation, etc. (Kopytoff, 1986). They are thus re-interpreted and re-
evaluated, sometimes simply because knowledge about them is not fully transferred
along with them (Appadurai, 1986: 56), but often also in light of the fact that they
come from foreign, distant areas, which may add to their value (Helms, 1988: 111–
130). This may happen separately from the fact that the transport itself was labor-
intensive or else in such a way that this labor input becomes ideologically concealed,
i.e., fetishized. The resulting new value ascription can, of course, differ markedly
from that of the society which manufactured those products.
It follows then that society-specific systems of use value cannot be generalized
for explaining product exchange systems functioning between two different societies
with diverging value systems. By contrast, the exchange value based on the “socially
necessary labor time” offers a measure independent from society-specific use values
that are not convertible between two different societies. In Marx’s own words, “…
when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values,
it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous
human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values
our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different
kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do
it” (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 88).
So, Marx gives us some criteria for determining if products did assume the char-
acter of commodities—criteria for which we can also find archaeological corre-
lates. We may ask (1) if certain artifacts were produced with the purpose of being
exchanged; (2) which quantities were actually exchanged; and (3) if the exchange
processes in which those products changed hands were of a regular, recurring nature
and thus had the potential to influence the economic and social relations of the
participating exchange partners.
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 143

In a developed stage of commodity exchange, social and economic mechanisms

lead to the fixation of one specific commodity as a general, socially accepted value
equivalent—i.e., a value equivalent, in which all other commodities express their
value. Money is invented (Marx, 1962 [1867], 82–83; for a concrete historical case
study centering on the start of coinage see e.g. Furtwängler, 2016).
In other words, in pre-capitalist societies, the commodity character of products
may have taken shape gradually, “revealing” (so to speak) their exchange value by
expressing it in more and more other commodities and ultimately in a general value
equivalent—though this did not necessarily happen in a continuous and progres-
sive way and in all interacting societies contemporaneously. That commodity char-
acter of products is best captured by referring to the Marxian “exchange value”—as
opposed to Appadurai’s a-historical concept of “the commodity situation in the life
of any ‘thing’” coupled with his rejection of the production perspective (Appadurai,
1986: 13), which obscures precisely the important point, when the use value and the
exchange value of a product become separated.
Functions of money according to Marx
1. Measure of value. It expresses the value of commodities and functions as a
general social equivalent (allgemeines gesellschaftlich gültiges Wertäquiva-
lent), because it is itself a product of labor (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 83–85, 101,
109, 113).2
2. Standard of price. (Imagined) weighable metal units with their subdivisions
become standards of price (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 112).
3. Means of circulation, expressed by the formula commodity—money—
commodity (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 118–143).
Ad 1 and 2. “As measure of value, and as standard of price, money has two entirely
distinct functions to perform. It is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially
recognised incarnation of human labour; it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is
a fixed weight of metal” (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 113).

2 “It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable,

that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted
into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the
phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent
in commodities, labour-time” (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 109).
144 R. Jung

Capital

Capital is defined by Marx as being a value, which valorizes itself (Marx, 1962
[1867]: 169).3 For its appearance, certain historical preconditions have to be met.
The first is the existence of free laborers owning their labor power as a commodity.
The second precondition is a labor market, on which the laborer is selling the only
commodity he/she possesses, his/her “labor power,” to an owner of some means of
production, to a capitalist, on a temporary basis (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 182–183). By
paying him/her a wage, the capitalist buys the labor power, the commodity of the
laborer, according to its exchange value. As is the case with any other commodity,
the exchange value of the labor power is determined by the socially necessary time
needed for its production, i.e., for the production of the goods the laborer needs to
survive (including the goods for dependent family members). Having bought the
labor power, the capitalist puts it to work and he/she seeks to extend the work time of
the laborer, in order to extract surplus value. Surplus value is created by unpaid labor,
i.e. by the extra time span, the laborer works for the capitalist after the subtraction
of the wage (Marx, 1962 [1867]: 184–189, 230–232, 244).
The described factors hold good for industrial capital, and we may agree that
in the economic systems of the Bronze Age, no significant labor market existed in
the countries surrounding the Mediterranean (on the mobilization of labor in the
Mycenaean palatial system see Palaima, 2015; for the mobilization of labor at Ugarit
see Heltzer, 1999). However, there is also merchant capital, which according to Marx,
historically precedes the formation of industrial capital.

Merchant’s Capital: Buying in Order to Sell Dearer (Marx, 1962 [1867]:

170)

Merchant’s capital “merely promotes the exchange of commodities; yet this exchange
is not to be conceived at the outset as a bare exchange of commodities between direct
producers. […] The merchant buys and sells for many. […] But whatever the social
organisation of the spheres of production whose commodity exchange the merchant
promotes, his wealth exists always in the form of money, and his money always
serves as capital. […] Money, the independent form of exchange-value, is the point
of departure, and increasing the exchange-value an end in itself” (Marx, 1964 [1894]:
338). The characteristic circulation of merchant’s capital is money—commodity—
money (M—C—M’), which is at the same time the general formula of capital (Marx,
1962 [1867]: 170).

3 “Denn die Bewegung, worin er [der Wert] Mehrwert zusetzt, ist seine eigne Bewegung, seine
Verwertung als Selbstverwertung”. In the English translation this becomes: “For the movement, in
the course of which it [the value] adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore,
is automatic expansion,” quoted after https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.
htm.
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 145

Marx goes on to explain that “So long as merchant’s capital promotes the exchange
of products between undeveloped societies, commercial profit not only appears as
out-bargaining and cheating, but also largely originates from them. Aside from
the fact that it exploits the difference between the prices of production of various
countries (and in this respect it tends to level and fix the values of commodities),
those modes of production bring it about that merchant’s capital appropriates an
overwhelming portion of the surplus-product” (Marx, 1964 [1894]: 343).
A good example for such a mechanism from the Bronze Age is provided by the
city of Assur on the Tigris River during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE,
for the economy of Assur largely depended on trade, by export of woolen textiles, tin
and lapis lazuli to and import of gold and silver from central Asia Minor. Almost all
the commodities traded by family firms of that city-state, which at that time did not
feature a palace and did not rule an empire, were produced in faraway regions (textiles
being a partial exception, because they were also locally produced). However, the
detailed clay tablet archives from the kārum outpost (trading quarter) at the city of
Kanesh convey that Assyrian traders were able to appropriate a large surplus product,
as is indicated by huge price differences for silver when bought at Kanesh in Asia
Minor and then exchanged for southern imports at Assur in Mesopotamia (Veenhof,
2010). In fact, when those archives for the first time in human history preserve the
expression “to make money”—literally “to make silver”—and also state the goal “to
covert merchandise [again] into silver” (Veenhof, 1997: 363) they reveal the very
essence of merchant’s capital. However, Assyriologists classify this kind of silver-
focused exchange as “a much more ‘monetarian’ economy than anywhere else in the
ancient Near East” (Veenhof, 1997: 340).

Part B—The Mediterranean Bronze Age Evidence

The Beginnings in the 3rd Millennium and the Early 2nd

Millennium

In the early 3rd millennium BCE we witness the introduction of a Near Eastern
weight system—perhaps first on the western coast of Asia Minor and then spreading
to the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland (Rahmstorf, 2016b). Sphendonoid to
rectangular weight shapes were first employed in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE
(Rahmstorf, 2016b: 254; Rahmstorf, 2016c: 29–31, Fig. 2.3). In the early 3rd millen-
nium, the Aegean communities created a specifically regional spool-shaped type—
often made of colorful stone and reproducing different Mesopotamian and Syrian
weight units (Horejs, 2016; Rahmstorf, 2016b: 238–256). We are dealing mainly
with small weights. The heaviest mainly range between 91.8 and 190 g (Rahmstorf,
2006: 80, Fig. 17). However, a late EH II context at Ayía Iríni on the Cycladic island
of Keos yielded a large weight of 3790 g (almost exactly 400 times a weight of 9.4 g,
146 R. Jung

or else 8 minas or 4 double minas), together with two further spools and a large
piece of litharge (Rahmstorf, 2006: 76–78, Fig. 13–14). Already some of the earliest
Aegean weights were part of assemblages related to metal production and therefore
possibly also to the exchange of metals (Rahmstorf, 2015: 164–166, Fig. 12; Rahm-
storf, 2016b: 250–251, 253–255). So, the first step to express abstract human labor
objectified in products (almost certainly including metals) that were exchanged had
been taken. It was the introduction of Mesopotamian weight systems for exchange
processes that allowed the precise measurement of that objectified labor; as the work
required to produce a product could now be related directly to its mass. However, in
the absence of texts, we do not know if any general, socially accepted value equiv-
alent did exist in Greece or Asia Minor in the 3rd millennium BCE. We also do not
know if the Mesopotamian system of daily rations for alienated labor existed in the
Aegean at that time.

The Later 2nd Millennium

Proceeding to the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, we are now much better
informed about Mediterranean exchange processes. Letters in the royal and non-
royal archives—e.g., at Tell el-Amarna in Upper Egypt and Ugarit in coastal northern
Syria—document large-scale goods exchange taking place between kings as well as
recording goods exchanges between rulers and their subordinates. Both on the level
of formalized gift exchange and in openly commercial interactions, value equivalents
could be registered by giving prices in silver quantities, i.e., the general value equiv-
alent, which was socially accepted among the kingdoms around the eastern Mediter-
ranean. In formalized gift exchange, such references to silver quantities would often
only be implicit. However, even in such cases, the kings expressed concern about
the equivalent values of the gifts they received (Zaccagnini, 1973: 79–80). Finished
objects of refined craftsmanship functioning as status symbols of the ruling classes
such as chariots, weapons, and vessels, often specifically named as products of this
or that country or made in a specific country’s style, became even more appreciated
when a gift received from a foreign king was re-used, as it was given to a third
king (Liverani, 2001: 157–158). This would be a clear example of the concept of an
ideologically determined use value.
From Ugarit, we know quite a number of prices for different products (and even
plots of land), expressed in shekels of silver, but these products were not necessarily
commodities exchanged between two owners (Courtois, 1990). It is furthermore
interesting to note that the palace used the value equivalent of silver to register debt
obligations, which then were paid by the debtor in the form of labor conducted
for the palace (McGeough, 2015: 88–89). Weighed quantities of silver as a general
value equivalent of course have a long history in Bronze Age Mesopotamia (see also
above). This metal was even used in tax collection as the final means of payment to
the palace, i.e., by middlemen, who collected the payment in kind from peasants and
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 147

herders and then converted it into silver in the early second millennium Babylonia
(Van De Mieroop, 2014).
In stark contrast to Ugarit, in Mycenaean Greece the Linear B texts from the
different palaces do not provide us with any indications for the use of a general,
socially accepted value equivalent for the internal economic affairs of the palatial
administration. Occasionally products were offset against quantities of other prod-
ucts, i.e., a textile (of unspecified quantity!) against a quantity of cereals (Montecchi,
2007). It seems that any kind of product could become a means of payment to the
palace (Montecchi, 2007: 489; Luján, 2011: 25). As for transactions, the palace of
Knossós, for instance, recorded in two cases that a certain person bought a slave
from another person—though without mentioning the price, for the palatial adminis-
trators were seemingly only interested in monitoring the fact that these transactions
took place (Olivier, 1987 [with the hypothesis that these texts were only extracts of
unpreserved purchase contracts]; Montecchi, 2007: 488; Zurbach, 2017: 665–666).
Finally, Julien Zurbach has recently put forward good arguments for the exis-
tence of debt slavery, citing the “slaves of the divinity” and connecting them to
loans of so-called “holy” or “temple gold” by Mycenaean temples. However, the
relevant Linear B texts he refers to do not provide detailed evidence as to how that
mechanism of lending gold (Hackgold in Zurbach’s interpretation) may have worked
(Zurbach, 2017). At the end of his argument, Zurbach suggests that the very objective
of granting loans in gold might even have been the enslavement of indebted people
as a mechanism used by the temples for acquiring additional workforce (Zurbach,
2017: 669). This would mean the temples managed to turn their gold into capital,
but so far, this is a hypothesis (on debt slavery in general see Zeuske, 2013: 102,
106–107). However, according to Eugenio Luján, the Linear B texts do not provide
any other evidence for gold and silver functioning as a means of exchange or as a
means of payment (Luján, 2011: 30).
Now, in the exchange processes with other societies—unfortunately not docu-
mented in the Linear B record—things may have been quite different, for here the
Mycenaean palaces had to take part in established exchange practices operating on
the basis of value equivalents expressed in weighed quantities of precious metals
(Montecchi, 2007: 490). The existence of Near Eastern weight types at Mycenaean
settlement sites offers some concrete indication in that respect (Rahmstorf, 2008:
159–163). Moreover, at the thirteenth-century Mycenaean palace of Thebes, a weight
assemblage came to light which includes both disc-shaped weights of Aegean type
and sphendonoid weights of Near Eastern type. One of the five sphendonoid weights
is marked with a circle—apparently denoting one unit. Its weight seems to fit with
a well-known Mycenaean unit of about 20 g (also identified in the Linear B record),
while at the same time, all five weights apparently correspond to different quantities
of the “Ugaritic shekel,” which itself would be half the quantity of the Mycenaean
unit. Therefore, the Mycenaean palace administration at Thebes seems to have taken
measures to ensure the convertibility of value expressions for external exchange rela-
tions—involving luxury goods, precious metals, or bulk metals such as copper and
tin, which all had to be imported to Greece from various other Mediterranean regions
(Aravantinos & Alberti, 2006). At this point, one must not forget that exploitation
148 R. Jung

of the Attic silver ores already formed part of the Mycenaean economy (for Myce-
naean mining see Spitaels, 1984; Mountjoy, 1995) and that silver figured among the
Mycenaean products exported to the east—be it in the shape of ingots or in the form
of finished luxury objects such as vessels (Wardle & Wardle, 1997: 99; Jung, 2015:
253–255).
It is possible that Hackgold was used in these exchange relations too, for the
aforementioned small weights were suited for such quantities of gold. This is also
indicated by the finds from the Uluburun ship from the fourteenth century BCE,
which had apparently been bound for the Aegean and had two Mycenaean palace
officials on board (Pulak, 2005; cf. Kilian, 1993; Jung, 2005). It carried an assemblage
of gold and silver in the form of scrap as well as ring ingots (Yalçın et al., 2005: 611–
614), found in an area where weights and the personal belongings of crew members,
including Mycenaean and Egyptian seals, were present as well—all pointing to a
voyage undertaken in connection with royal goods exchange (Kilian, 1993; Pulak,
2008; for the use of ingots as well as gold and silver scrap as payment in the eastern
Mediterranean see Gestoso Singer, 2015).

Copper Ingots

Regarding the possible commodity character of the products exchanged across the
eastern Mediterranean, a well-known class of product that travelled long distances
and in huge quantities was copper ingots. The well-known Uluburun cargo of the
late fourteenth century comprised c. 10 t of copper (in the shape of oxhide as well
as plano-convex ingots) and 1 t of tin (Pulak, 2000a), which would result in 11 t
of bronze with a 9% tin content, an optimal alloy attested frequently in that period.
However, one must allow for a loss of material, as both the copper of the oxhide
ingots and that of the plano-convex ingots contained considerable amounts of slag
from the smelting process—apparently in contrast to the tin of the tin ingots (cf.
Pulak, 2000a: 152). It is blister copper in need of further refinement (Hauptmann
et al., 2002). Now, even assuming that only 10 t of bronze could have been produced
with that cargo and taking into consideration some 20% of metal loss during casting,
grinding, and polishing, that amount of metal would, for example, have been enough
to produce 33,684 Mycenaean swords of Sandars’ type D (with an average mass of
237.5 g),4 common at the time and attested on the shipwreck itself.
It is beyond doubt that mass production of copper was practiced in Cyprus at least
since around 1350 BCE. First, we have the Uluburun shipwreck. Second, we have
the contemporary palace archive from Akhetaton (Amarna) with letters recording
amounts such as 100 talents, 200 pieces (ingots), 500 (ingots), 120 (ingots)—all

4 The calculation is based on measurements at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. EAM

3196, sword from chamber tomb 91 at Mycenae (Tsountas’ excavations, Xenaki-Sakellariou, 1985:
260, pls. 127, VIII): 249 g.—EAM 3197, sword from chamber tomb 91 at Mycenae (Tsountas’
excavations, Xenaki-Sakellariou, 1985: 260, pls. 127, VIII): 231.5 g.—EAM 6634, sword from
chamber tomb 25 at Prósimna (Blegen, 1937: 330, Fig. 198 [top]): 232 g.—Metal loss during
casting, grinding and polishing estimated by Mathias Mehofer (VIAS, University of Vienna).
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 149

originating in Alašiya, i.e., Cyprus (Knapp, 2011: 250–251). Metal analyses of oxhide
ingots found all around the Mediterranean prove their Cypriot provenance for the
fourteenth, thirteenth, and twelfth centuries BCE (Begemann et al., 2001; Gale &
Stos-Gale, 2012). In addition, recent results from the ongoing excavations at Hala
Sultan Tekke prove that during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries primary copper
smelting processes could take place in a major coastal city, i.e., close to the harbor
rather than to the ore deposits in the interior of the island (Mehofer, 2014; Fischer,
2018). Finally, in some of the Amarna letters, the king of Alašiya refers to payments
for the delivered copper (Gestoso Singer, 2015: 93–94). One may conclude that this
large-scale copper production for wide-ranging exchange purposes meets several
conditions for a commodity exchange regime.
However, we must not forget the often-noted variable sizes of both oxhide and
plano-convex ingots. The oxhide ingots from the Uluburun wreck seem to target a
mass of around 23.5 kg (Pulak, 2000a: 143, Fig. 7), while the mass of excavated
oxhide ingots from all over the Mediterranean oscillates between 21 and 39 kg
(Knapp, 2011: 250). Thus, any calculation of copper amounts that was based on
simple ingot counts at the harbor would have been a quite imprecise procedure.
Weighing during each exchange transaction may have taken place in the harbors
(Pulak, 1997: 238), and heavy weights of several kilos did exist at e.g., Ugarit
(including a single weight of 28.9 kg for the unit of one talent, see Bordreuil, 2004;
Bordreuil, 2006), in Mycenaean administrative buildings (Aravantinos & Alberti,
2006: 302–304; cf. also Verdelis, 1964: 166, pl. 120α) and on the Uluburun ship as
well (though these are exceptions among the many small weights, see Pulak, 2000b:
253 tab. 17.1 [nos. W 129 and W 130], 263–264). Yet, in view of the fact that blister
copper was shipped, only medium to long-term experience on the part of the importer
could establish a numeric relation to the desired end product.
In conclusion, there was neither a precise relationship between the socially neces-
sary labor time and one ingot on the side of the producer nor a precise relationship
between the imported raw material and the pure copper needed for bronze production
on the side of the importer—a Mycenaean palace, for instance. The latter is remark-
able in light of the fact that the Mycenaean palatial administration kept records
of (a) quite small amounts of copper or bronze (e.g. 1.5 kg, 3 kg, 5 kg, 6 kg) as
assignments to smiths for producing bronze objects (Smith, 1992–1993) and (b)
used and damaged bronze objects in store (Ventris & Chadwick, 1973: 336–337).
However, when drawing conclusions from these practices, one needs to note that the
mentioned records all come from the palace of Pylos. We do not have records from the
other palaces that refer to copper/bronze production in similar detail. In addition—
and perhaps more important—all the Linear B tablets were fired in conflagrations
destroying the palaces. There are good reasons to believe that these destructions were
man-made and followed economic and political crisis situations (Jung, in press).
Unfortunately, we do not know how the Mycenaean palaces organized the import
of copper and tin, but given the vital importance of these two metals in the production
of tools, weapons, and armor, one has to suppose some kind of record keeping. One
can only speculate, on which scribal media and at which places this might have
happened, as the Linear B documents from the palace archives are almost totally
150 R. Jung

silent on import and export matters (for indirect hints in some texts see Killen, 2008:
181–189).
In conclusion, it seems first that the Cypriot copper traded between the different
eastern Mediterranean state societies did have a commodity character, though
defining its precise exchange value in terms of objectified abstract human labor
(whether expressed in silver or other value equivalents) must have been a difficult
undertaking and certainly did not reach the precision known from modern metal
trading. Second, as follows from what has been said before, it appears that bulk
copper trading cannot be classified as market exchange, but was strongly determined
by political factors. Finally, there are no indications—neither in the Linear B texts
nor in the archaeological record—that the imported metals continued to circulate as
commodities upon entering the Mycenaean economy.

Mycenaean Pottery

Regarding Mycenaean exports, it is worth exploring whether products stored in

ceramic vessels or the pottery vessels themselves may have assumed a commodity
character. Painted Mycenaean ceramics of the second half of the 14th and the first
half of the thirteenth century BCE constitute a specific class of widely distributed
products. Wherever chemical analyses have been conducted on Mycenaean vessels of
that period—found by the hundreds at sites in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, or Cyprus—
the results have shown that the vast majority of the analyzed pots came from the
northern Argolid, i.e., the region of Mycenae (Jung, 2015; Mountjoy, 2015). More-
over, for export to the Levant and Cyprus specific types were chosen that resemble
local, traditional Cypriot and Levantine pottery shapes (which in those regions were
regularly produced without painted decoration). Examples are the amphoroid krater
and the shallow strap-handled bowl. These are shapes only rarely used in Greece
itself (Jung, 2015: 246–251).
Specific quality traits—in terms of very well levigated clay, good firing as well as
shiny paint and surface—make Mycenaean painted pottery from the Argolid stand out
in comparison with many Cypriot and Levantine pottery classes. For this quality to be
reached, all production operations required very well-educated personnel and lengthy
preparation procedures in the workshop facilities. Those workshops themselves have
not been discovered yet (the potter’s kiln at Berbati being earlier in date, Schallin,
2002), but their output quantities known today hint at quite large installations. The
meagre Linear B evidence provides us with some additional information, though
unfortunately not from the region of the specialized export manufacture. Texts from
Pylos in Messenia show that some Mycenaean potters were directly part of the royal
economic sector. In addition, they could hold estates and also fulfilled administrative
duties as functionaries of the palace (for a thorough survey of all the Linear B evidence
related to Mycenaean potters see Boulotis, 2014).
We can therefore safely assume the existence of a centrally administered Myce-
naean pottery production in the region of Mycenae with a large output targeting
consumers in Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt. When that export manufacture stopped
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 151

around 1250 BCE (i.e., some decades before the breakdown of the Mycenaean palace
state) no other Greek region filled that gap. There were only some limited shipments
of Mycenaean pottery produced in Cyprus and Asia Minor to the Levant (for the
latter, see Mountjoy & Mommsen, 2015: 487–488, Fig. 14). All of this suggests that
its production and its export from the Argolid were economic processes organized
and supervised by the palatial administration itself.
Finally, Cypriot, Levantine, and Egyptian archaeological evidence indicate that
the population of those regions began to ascribe rather high relative values to imported
Mycenaean pots. The basis for comparison and for the tentative assessment of the
relative value (which cannot be differentiated into use and exchange value) is the
association of imported Mycenaean pots with other objects in closed contexts. The
prominent presence of Mycenaean imports not only in rich tombs in Cyprus (espe-
cially the class with pictorial decoration, see Keswani, 2004: 142) but also in different
Levantine and Egyptian palaces such as Ugarit and Qatna may suggest that the royal
exchange mechanisms—assigned to high-ranking merchants—were at least partially
responsible for the importation of that pottery and its contents (Jung, 2015: 261–263).
At Akhenaten’s residence city Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), the predominant use of
Mycenaean pottery inside the palace and the rather marginal presence in the town
(Hassler, 2008) argue in favor of that hypothesis.
The large quantities produced in the Argolid and shipped over several decades to
the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean suggest that the Mycenaean palace economy
would have aimed at an improvement of production organization for controlling the
quantity and quality of product output. This, in turn, would have necessitated an
improvement in time management and administration. In such processes, average
production time (socially necessary labor) automatically becomes the factor deter-
mining the exchange process to a large extent. Time management would have deter-
mined how many amphoroid craters with chariot representations, how many shallow
bowls with added white paint, and how many small stirrup jars filled with unguents
could be sent e.g., to a king in Amurru on the Syrian coast and at what intervals
certain amounts were available for different external exchange partners. Through
the repeated exchange, the Mycenaean side would also have acquired a better idea
of how fast what amounts of desired goods could be received in return. This would
have pointed ultimately and effectively to value equivalents between Mycenaean and
Amorite products.
In conclusion, Argive Mycenaean pottery vessels exported to Egypt, Cyprus, and
the Levant did have some commodity qualities—but we cannot say against which
specific products they were exchanged by the exporting palatial administration (and
its agents). The specialized and at the same time centralized Argive production and
the distribution pattern of Argive ceramic products in the different kingdoms of
the eastern Mediterranean both suggest that we are again not dealing with market
exchange, but with largely politically determined and regulated product exchange
mechanisms.
152 R. Jung

Canaanite Jars

The ovoid to conical so-called Canaanite jars represent another pottery class, some of
which seem to have been especially manufactured in large quantities to be exported
to other regions and therefore merit a brief mention here. In contrast to the Myce-
naean pots, the only function of the (mostly) unpainted Canaanite jars was to serve as
containers for the goods that were meant to be exchanged, i.e., a wide variety of agri-
cultural products (mainly wine, oils, resin), and they appear in different size classes
(Pedrazzi, 2007, 2016). Petrographic and chemical analyses in combination with
typological studies and distribution maps show that basically all societies along the
Levantine coasts exported products packaged in such jars (most recently Day et al.,
2020 with bibliography). However, specific jar types seem to have been character-
istic for bulk exchange between different palace states (Pedrazzi, 2016: type 5-4).
Yet, even those specialized types exhibit not only size clusters but show considerable
variability of capacity even within each size class, so that the jars themselves did not
convey specific units of the products they carried (Cateloy, 2016; Monroe, 2016).
This is a phenomenon similar to the oxhide ingots that could not simply be counted
to assess the amount of copper they contained (see above), but Monroe stresses the
rather low exchange value (expressed in silver) of the wine and resin transported in
Canaanite jars on the Uluburun ship, if compared to the metal cargo of the same ship
(Monroe, 2016: 91–92). In the case of Canaanite jars, inscriptions could be applied
to them, when precise product quantities were of interest. This may have happened
when an Egyptian temple estate administration was directly involved in agricultural
production in the Levant (Bavay, 2015). However, in the latter case, we may not be
dealing with commodities to be exchanged, but rather with products of an Egyptian
institution that were produced outside Egypt (i.e., in the Levant), though under the
direct control of that institution.

Markets and Merchant’s Capital

Even though the commoditization of products occurred to various degrees in eastern

Mediterranean societies, one has to note that it has so far not been possible to identify
structures functioning as marketplaces or suqs—neither on Cyprus nor in Greece
(though their existence has been purported, see Pullen, 2013). Even at Ugarit with its
large-scale excavations of the thirteenth-century-BCE town, no such urban structure
could be identified with certainty (McGeough, 2007: 308). Recently, Adelheid Otto
tentatively interpreted the Grand Place in the southern part of town as a marketplace
and based her argument on certain spaces opening to the square (possible shops) and
on finds of a few weights and seals (Otto, 2019: 206–209), though balance weights
were common in many Ugaritan houses (McGeough, 2007: 307–308). Though one
has to admit the difficulties in identifying the function of open spaces (be it in
settlements or at harbor sites), the lack of architecturally defined marketplaces/suqs
seems to be a significant indicator for the non-dominant role of commodity exchange
in those economies, while one has to keep in mind that not all kinds of commodity
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 153

exchange would require the existence of marketplaces and market mechanisms in

the first place (cf. the trade between kings/palaces, see above).
Regarding the issue of whether the possible commodity exchange between eastern
Mediterranean societies could have included the formation of merchant’s capital, the
key problem is proving that a merchant has owned his merchandise. Of the two
categories of Ugaritic merchants known from the texts, those of the first group had to
pay taxes to the king (supposedly on their profits) and were called “royal dependents,”
while those of the second group were personal traders of the king (“of his feet”) and
were granted exemptions from taxes (Heltzer, 1988: 8). In either case, it is difficult to
decide whether during his trading activity a merchant was only the prolonged arm of
the king and the ruling class of palatial bureaucrats or if he was at least temporarily
the immediate owner of the merchandise and therefore could realize the merchant’s
capital.
In the late thirteenth century, a man called Yabninu resided in a spacious building
immediately to the south of the king’s palace at Ugarit. He himself was not a part of
the royal family, so it seems. Yet, he played quite an important role in the kingdom’s
diplomatic affairs. On one journey to Amurru—further south along the Syrian coast—
he took with him 100 shekels of gold and textiles and poured oil on the head of the
Amurru princess. Another text, a kind of “account” of Yabninu, lists oil products,
wood products, etc., the value of which is given as 600 shekels of silver (McGeough,
2015). Apparently, his linked economic and diplomatic activities made him a rich
man. Persons like him may foreshadow independent traders of the Iron Age, and
conflicts between such individuals and the ruling classes of kings and bureaucrats
might have contributed to the breakdown or overthrow of the palace economies
(cf. Liverani, 1987: 69–73). The result would have been that holders of means of
production and commodities, who had been acting on behalf of the palace, would have
become owners of these means and thus were ultimately able to realize merchant’s
capital in the true sense of the word.

Contacts to Pre-state Societies in the Later 2nd Millennium

A quick look at pre-state economies in the central Mediterranean and their contacts
to the east may serve as a last step in this investigation. In Italy, the use of specialized
stone weights of two different basic shapes started in the Italian Middle Bronze Age
2 or 3—so most probably around 1400 BCE (Cardarelli et al., 1997; Ialongo, 2019;
Ialongo & Rahmstorf, 2019). It seems that the Italian weight system(s) followed
an Aegean prototype or was created to correspond in some points with the Aegean
system (Ialongo, 2019: 216, Fig. 10; 218). Thus the introduction of those weights
may have been motivated by constant Italo-Aegean contacts, which in the south of the
Apennine peninsula evidently go back to the seventeenth century BCE, as Mycenaean
pottery imports prove (Jones et al., 2014). However, the two basic weight shapes,
lentoid with a groove and globular to piriform with a pierced lug, are local inventions.
The masses of those weights, ranging from 295 g to 848 g (Cardarelli et al., 1997:
154 R. Jung

633–634, Figs. 361–362), would be suited to weighing small and medium to large
quantities of metal—e.g., of copper and tin, the basic metals for making means of
labor and weapons.
In the last few years, chemical and lead isotope analyses have successfully unrav-
eled the central Mediterranean copper and bronze circulation from the fourteenth to
the eleventh century BCE. The basic results are as follows:
• Italian bronze workers from the Po plain in the north to Apulia and Calabria in the
south mainly relied on copper imports from the Trentino region in the Southern
Alps (Jung et al., 2011; Villa & Giardino, 2019; Jung 2020; Jung et al., 2021;
Jung et al., in press).
• By contrast, there are no indications for copper export to Mycenaean Greece in the
form of ingots. Only certain classes of finished bronze weapons and implements
were shipped east (Jung & Mehofer, 2013: 178).
• A limited overlap of raw copper circulation between Italy and Greece did occur,
but was confined to the very south (as imported Cypriot copper ingot fragments
from Apulia indicate, see Jung et al., in press).
The mentioned innovative stimulus for producing specialized weights may well
be due to Italo-Aegean exchange relationships. However, the invention of specific
Italian weight shapes and the absence of Aegean-type weights in Italy in combination
with the distribution pattern of Trentino copper, which overlaps with the distribution
pattern of the Italian weights (most recently Ialongo & Rahmstorf, 2019: 114–115,
Figs. 9–10), suggests that this innovation basically served exchange relationships
along the central Mediterranean coasts. Copper from the Southern Alps was appar-
ently systematically produced for regular exchange purposes spanning the whole
of the Apennine peninsula. Weighing of metal quantities seems to have played an
important role in those exchange relationships.
Interestingly, after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, a weight of Italian type was
in use at Lefkandí on Euboea in the second half of the twelfth century BCE (Pare,
2013: 511, Fig. 29.2.5, 520). This is a period, for which we have good evidence
suggesting that in Greece the palace economy (Asiatic Mode of Production) had
given way to a new mode of production based on private ownership of the means
of production, i.e., the mode of production usually perceived as an o‡κoς economy
continuing into the Early Iron Age (cf. Donlan, 1997). In southern continental Italy,
the observation that large-scale storage appears dispersed both in larger settlements
(with pithos magazines present in several houses) and in hamlets (pithos magazines
scattered throughout the rural landscape) suggests a similar mode of production
based on private rather than communal property. This may have come about with the
intensified exchange relationships between those two Mediterranean regions, which
is visible in the wide range of artifact classes in both Greece and Italy (D’Agata
et al., 2012; Jung & Mehofer, 2013; Jones et al., 2014; Iacono, 2019). Interestingly,
the adoption of Aegean storage techniques—i.e., the production and use of huge
jars (pithoi)—from c. 1200 BCE onwards was followed by a considerable increase
in stored surplus products during the following decades. In Apulia and Calabria,
one can observe quantities of stored agricultural products (most probably wine and
8 Uneven and Combined: Product Exchange in the Mediterranean … 155

olive oil) that amounted to several thousands of liters per house and thus surpassed
stored products in coeval Mycenaean houses (Jung & Pacciarelli, 2017). It seems
that new production techniques, which elude us for now, are responsible for that
economic success in the Italian south—a production increase that was not coupled
with centralized storage as it was practiced in the Mycenaean palaces. At this point,
it is important to note that the communities in the south of Italy never went through
the stage of a palatial economy that characterized southern and central Greece in
the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. Instead, they seem to have established a
mode of production based on private landed property (as indicated by the dispersed
large-scale storage) in the twelfth century BCE, i.e., roughly at the same time as an
analogous mode of production was introduced in Late Mycenaean Greece. However,
those communities in southern Italy were departing from big men or small chiefdom
societies with small-scale tributary economies. Marco Pacciarelli and I have tried to
explain these phenomena with reference to Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and
combined development (Jung & Pacciarelli, 2017).
To be sure, for more than 20 years this specific theoretical approach has been in
the focus of a methodological debate, mainly in the fields of international relations
(in political science) and modern history. That debate centered on the question,
whether (1) “uneven and combined development” is a transhistorical phenomenon
and (2) whether this approach offers a method in its own right, able to solve the
problem of “the international” (dimension of the social world). Critics gave a negative
answer to the second question, and several of them proposed using the approach in
conjunction with a thorough analysis of the modes of production of the societies
involved in specific historical relations with one another (Callinicos in Callinicos &
Rosenberg, 2008: 82, 101; Rioux, 2015: 507). The latter is precisely what the author
who formulated the approach had done. Trotsky conceptualized his “laws” of uneven
combined development as parts of historical materialism, in order to enlarge its scope
to a global scale and to apply its methodology to economic, social, and political
relations between different societies (Trotzki, 1973 [1930]: 13–23)—at the time
motivated among other things by a reaction to the dead-end paradigm of Stageism,
which insisted on a pre-described way of development for every human society (i.e.,
passing through a series of necessary stages). His was in fact one of many Marxist
attempts to understand and explain the development of non-European societies, while
preceding postcolonial and subalternist theories by many decades (Chibber, 2013:
291–293).
Uneven and combined developments may very well have led to economic and
social “jumps” accelerating the progress from mode of production A toward a new
mode of production C in one society without passing through mode of production
B, which a second society did form after A and prior to arriving at C. However, the
concrete historical conditions and driving forces enabling such a development need to
be analyzed. Although some have claimed the opposite (Post, 2018), nothing excludes
the possibility that this happened also in societies antedating the first formation of a
capitalist mode of production by hundreds or thousands of years.
156 R. Jung

Conclusions

In conclusion, applying a classical Marxist approach allows us to detect specific

economic characteristics of goods exchange, which in the cases examined here
include:
• Various, often discontinuous stages of commodification processes in the 3rd and
2nd millennia BCE.
• Variable degrees of commodification for different product classes and different
regions/societies during those two millennia (often not involving market
exchange).
• The fixation of a general, socially accepted value equivalent only in the societies
of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Levant.
• Probable references by the Mycenaean palatial administration to the general,
socially accepted value equivalents of exterior exchange partners (for those
exchange purposes).
• Roughly an east-west gradient regarding commodification, contact-induced devel-
opments, under specific circumstances leading to a rapid acceleration in the devel-
opment of socio-economic relationships inside societies (uneven and combined
development).

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Kostas Passas for discussing with me various Marxian
economic concepts. Of course, all errors remain mine.

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Chapter 9
Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity
Exchange in Ancient Greece

Stefanos Gimatzidis

Abstract Early Greek economic relations were previously examined through a

gift exchange perspective inspired by epic literature and ethnography. A struc-
tured society and economy were presumed in subsequent interpretative narratives,
suggesting that valuable goods were exchanged mainly among and for the benefit
of elite members. This paper argues for an alternative understanding of the early
Greek economy through a new approach to the ritual dedication of bronze tripods in
Greek sanctuaries that has been traditionally perceived as an emblematic practice of
gift exchange. In this paper, tripod dedication is understood instead as a pronounced
manifestation of wealth exchange and accumulation in early Greece. This practice is
further scrutinised as a paradigm of border fluidity between gifts and commodities
depending on the social context of their circulation.

Introduction

An era of political fragmentation and decentralisation began in the Mediterranean

shortly before the end of the second millennium BCE. This was a transformative
period that followed the collapse of the palatial states in the eastern Mediterranean
and preceded the rise of the city-state, the polis, which was the cell of the Greek
culture in the Archaic and Classical period. During the Early Iron Age many small
kingdoms emerged in the territories of earlier large empires in the Aegean, Asia
Minor and the Syro-palestinian coast. The political organisation of the new states is
less well known. Especially in the Aegean there is only indirect information deriving
from epic literature and a rather fragmented archaeological record. In contrast to
the Near East the archaeological landscape of the Early Iron Age Aegean is better
known through mortuary than settlement evidence. Simplistic models of political
hierarchies comprising kings and aristocrats, and economic relations based on gift
exchange have been reconstructed for this period founded mainly on textual evidence.

S. Gimatzidis (B)
Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: stefanos.gimatzidis@oeaw.ac.at

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 163

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_9
164 S. Gimatzidis

The political change that followed the collapse of the centralised palatial hierar-
chies of the Late Bronze Age gave rise to massive economic and social transforma-
tions. Economic transactions passed into the control of the newly emerged Greek,
Cypriot, Phoenician, Neo-Hittite, Aramaean and other small states. A transition from
a centrally controlled economy to economic relations driven by smaller institutions
or individuals is usually assumed in this new political context. The paradigm of
wandering Odysseus and his economic transactions overseas inspired archaeological
and historical interpretive models and narratives. Despite the continuing scholarly
debate that has been going on since the times of Marcel Mauss and Moses Finley,
archaeology still lacks, nevertheless, empirical evidence and a theoretical framework
for the reconstruction of this transformative period’s economy.
This paper undertakes a new reading of economic relations in Early Iron
Age Greece after reconsidering the available textual, archaeological and scientific
evidence through a theoretical approach that diverges from the until now domi-
nant consumption-oriented perspective. The starting point for the definition of early
Greek economy as “good-faith” or “self-interest”, which previously formed the main
explanatory trajectories in economic history, is the exploration of exchange value.
This is a requirement for the understanding of economic properties of goods that were
exchanged either as gifts or commodities accordingly regulating social relations (see
the introductory chapter in this book). Finally, it is the validity of these very same
dichotomies—“good-faith” or “self-interest” and gift or commodity—that is put into
question.

The Exchange Value of Copper in Ancient Texts

Early literature and other forms of texts present valuable information about exchange
values during the Early Iron Age and the immediately preceding period in the
economy of the Mediterranean. This is a privilege in the archaeology of early historic
periods that not only supplements but also significantly determines the interpreta-
tion of the archaeological record. First and most significant are the cuneiform clay
tablets from Ugarit in Syria, including hundreds of administrative and economic
texts with information about economic transactions before the destruction of the city
in the early twelfth century BCE. This large corpus, supplemented by other texts
from Syria and Egypt, presents a rare opportunity for the reconstruction of exchange
values on interregional terms in the eastern Mediterranean. The second source of
textual evidence is Greek epic literature. This does not present direct information
about the form of transactions and values as the Ugaritic tablets and Egyptian papyri
do, but nevertheless still constitutes significant evidence for the reconstruction of
economic relations.
A first conclusion that can be immediately drawn after consideration of the avail-
able Aegean and Levantine textual evidence is that copper was one of the most
valuable products that was extensively exchanged in the Aegean and in eastern
Mediterranean. Almost all sources about ancient values agree on this point. Although
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 165

the Uluburun shipwreck has been repeatedly discussed in the past from a variety of
approaches and perspectives, questions still remain about the exchange values and
properties of the cargo and its entrepreneurial motives (Gates, 2011). The famous
ship sank in the fourteenth century BCE off the south-western coast of Asia Minor
carrying a cargo of ten tons of copper and one ton of tin ingots. The second largest
cargo comprised 149 Canaanite jars containing resin or wine, or probably both. Other
products were also on board such as glass ingots, Egyptian ebony logs, ivory blanks
and finished products such as bronze tools, weapons, gold and silver scrap, ivory
artefacts and of course ceramic vessels and foodstuffs.
A systematic study of the available textual evidence that achieved to convert the
value of the Uluburun ship to silver shekels of Ugarit’s standard reveals that its most
valuable cargo was by far raw metal. The ten tons of copper and one ton of tin were
thus estimated to have cost approximately 7000 shekels, while the assumed cargo of
1000 L of resin and wine would have cost 24.5 shekels. According to this estimation
a single horse costing 35 silver shekels was more valuable than the whole cargo of
the 149 jars of wine and resin in the Uluburun ship (Monroe, 2010, 2016).
An interesting aspect in overseas transactions during the Late Bronze Age that
becomes immediately apparent was the disproportionally large value of cooper and
tin compared to other commodities of probably similar bulk. In other words, the low
value of wine and resin is in stark contrast to their large bulk. These properties of
the Uluburun cargo have already been discussed to some extent and the symbolic
value of wine and other bulky goods such as pottery, as lubricants of other economic
transactions, has been previously suggested (Sherratt, 1999, 2015: 77).
The indisputable value of metals and particularly copper is further attested by
Greek epics. Bronze and iron in the form of cauldrons or ingots are listed in the
Iliad among the most common prizes awarded to the winners of the funeral games
organised by Achilles for Patroclus (Homer, Iliad 23.263–858). The first prize for
the chariot race was thus a large tripod of 22 measures and a female slave “skilled
in goodly handiwork”. A smaller, unused cauldron of four measures was the third
prize in the same race. The final fifth prize was a simple bowl probably also made of
bronze as were the tripods, while two talents of gold were given only as the fourth
prize in the same race. A large tripod of value equal to twelve oxen was the first prize
in wrestling. Iron was offered for the winners in throwing the discus and archery. A
silver bowl of six measures and a silver-studded sword were the first prizes in the foot
race and boxing contests, respectively. The tripod was also given as the first prize
in the chariot race, which was the most popular game of all, at another instance in
the Iliad. This was a chariot race in Elis, where Nestor’s father wanted to participate
with a four-horse chariot team (Homer, Iliad 11.698–702).
The award of tripods as first prizes in chariot races is indicative of these artefacts’
value. Chariot races was not only the most popular but also the most prestigious
game in the legendary Homeric world and in later historical periods. Participating in
the games of ancient Greek festivals with a chariot was an expression of high social
status. Owning and breeding horses was an expensive hobby enjoyed by aristocratic
families, who displayed their status in chariot races (Fisher, 2009: 535; Kyle, 1992:
89). Some of the victors in chariot races who were most commemorated in lyric
166 S. Gimatzidis

poetry were tyrants, who celebrated their victories by erecting precious dedications
in Panhellenic sanctuaries. The most valuable prize, 140 amphoras filled with oil,
awarded at the games organised during the Panathenaic festival in 370 BCE, was
offered to the winner of the two-horse chariot race (Neils, 1992: 16).
In the Homeric economy tripods seem to have had a universal exchange value.
This was defined—as in the case of other commodities—by comparison to oxen,
which constituted some of the most common “universal equivalents” used to facil-
itate exchange. Oxen were thus first in the Homeric list of the exchangeable goods
presenting simple and common value equivalents. The definition of Homeric values
seems to have been up to a certain point rational: a large tripod cost twelve oxen and
a female slave four (see above). A piece of golden armour cost one hundred oxen,
whereas a piece of bronze armour cost only nine (Homer, Iliad 6.234–236).
Most puzzling in this respect was a particular transaction between Glaucus and
Diomedes, who exchanged golden for bronze military gear. The Homeric poet
ascribed this to Zeus’ intervention, who took over Glaucus’ mind and made him
accept a gift of much lower value than that offered by him. This uneven transaction
cannot be adequately explained as a display of higher status from the side of Glaucus
in the context of competitive giving and generosity, and was understood as a public
declaration of Diomedes’ superiority. This is not the only unequal exchange in the
Homeric world that implies variable perceptions and manipulation of values (Cook,
2016; Donlan, 1982, 1989).
Almost all commodities exchanged as gifts or prizes in the Homeric world shared
at the same time social-symbolic and economic values. Tripods that usually appear
in modern historical representations as primarily symbolic artefacts obviously had
an acknowledged economic value that exceeded that of any other gift or commodity.
Particularly illuminating in this respect is a passage in the Odyssey (13.10–23) that
records the gifts given by the Phaeacians to Odysseus before his departure from their
island. King Alcinous had already gathered cloths, gold and other gifts brought by
Phaeacian aristocrats in a chest, but all these were apparently not enough for a fitting
farewell to Odysseus. The king therefore exhorts his people “come now, let us give
him a great tripod and a cauldron, each man of us, and we in turn will gather the
cost from among the people (“demos”), and repay ourselves. It were hard for one
man to give freely, without requital”. In the next day they “brought the bronze, that
gives strength to men” and the king himself supervised the stowing of the apparently
numerous tripods and cauldrons in the ship so that the large cargo would not hamper
the crew at their rowing. Tripods were apparently perceived as more valuable and
more greatly appreciated than the other gifts. The king himself stresses the value of
these objects by explaining that since the local aristocracy could not afford them,
taxes would have to be collected from the “demos” to compensate them for the
high expenses. The motive behind offering such valuable gifts without expecting
material recompense was not only to present Alcinous as a generous host, but also
to exhibit his authority among his people (cf. Hooker, 1989: 82–84; Papalexandrou
[2005: 13–52] regards the tripods also as “material tokens of leadership” endowed
by the Phaeacians to Odysseus, or as payment for information regarding navigation,
or as territorial marks). His reward was the enhancement of his reputation since
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 167

his generosity was commemorated three times in later episodes of the Odyssey by
the main actor of the epos himself. In one of these instances Odysseus lists “stores
of bronze and gold and raiment” by citing the most precious gift first in this order
(Homer, Odyssey 23.341). The literary picture of a ship loaded with tripods sailing
through the Aegean was probably not a Homeric invention but could have derived
from real life. This is at least what the archaeological record in Greece implies about
the use and exchange value of tripods as we shall see.

Tripod Dedication as Material Expression of Peer

Competitive Attitudes

“Gift exchange” has usually been understood as the framework of the Homeric
economy. Interestingly, direct exchanges of gifts between two parties were, however,
extremely rare—amounting to only three in number—in Homeric texts, where gifts
were mainly offered as prizes, rewards, tributes to chiefs, ransom, loans and within
a marriage contract or guest friendship (Donlan, 1989: 3; Hooker, 1989). There may
therefore have been further aspects in the “gift exchange” economy of the Early Iron
Age than those implied in the Greek epics or reconstructed in modern archaeological
literature.
Any attempt to recognise the material residue of “gift exchange” in past societies
is a difficult exercise. Early Iron Age Greece presents extra challenges in this respect
because settlements of this period are not well preserved or studied. The Early Iron
Age is mainly known in Greece through its mortuary material culture. Burial gifts,
however, represent different cultural relations that were defined by mortuary ideology
and deserve separate treatment. Based on a non-systematic survey of the available
settlement material from Greece it was previously assumed that metal objects were
rarely used in domestic contexts, while they were more common in allegedly sacred
spaces within settlements (Morris, 1986). Be that as it may, the more profound,
large assemblages of metal artefacts were offered to Greek sanctuaries. Personal
belongings such as fibulae, pins, amulets and other kinds of jewellery, weapons or
even horse gear, as well as locally produced metal and clay figurines and pottery
were dedicated in great numbers in Panhellenic and regional sanctuaries throughout
Greece, already before the Archaic period that witnessed the erection of votive statues
and other monuments. However, the oldest, most precious and also common votive
offering in many Greek sanctuaries was the bronze tripod, which was originally a
cooking vessel comprising a cauldron standing on three attached feet.
These artefacts were initially produced exclusively as cooking vessels in the
service of a few elite members of certain communities. Over the course of time
they acquired elaborate decoration with figurines attached to the ring-handles and
cast legs with incised decoration, and gradually lost their functionality. Most of them
were actually produced and used as objects of display. Their value was thus not only
defined by the scarcity of the metal but also by the handicraft in their manufacture
168 S. Gimatzidis

and mainly by their symbolism. Although such artefacts have attracted scholarly
attention for a long time and have been intensively studied at sites such as Olympia
(Maaß, 1978; Willemsen, 1957) and Delphi (Rolley, 1977), their socio-economic
implications in Homeric society are still not fully explored.
Tripods with attached cauldrons were dedicated as offerings to at least 28 out of
ca. 100 sanctuaries that have been archaeologically recorded all over continental and
insular Greece (the mapping of Early Iron Age sanctuaries in Kiderlen, 2010 and
Kiderlen et al., 2016 represents an earlier standpoint that does not include more recent
finds). They were particularly common at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia,
where they were dedicated throughout the Early Iron Age, and Delphi, where they
continued to be offered also in the following Archaic period. Not less than 1000
fragments belonging to several hundreds of tripods were found at Olympia. At the
sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi 230 tripods have been catalogued so far. The archae-
ological record is echoed in the text of Theopompos (FGrH 1, 314) who relates
that in the remote past bronze tripods rather than statues were erected at the Delphi
sanctuary. It is also reflected in the popularity enjoyed by the scene showing the
struggle for the Delphic tripod between Apollo and Heracles in Attic pottery after
the mid-sixteenth century BCE. This figurative scene was probably not an allusion to
the cultic tripod of Apollo but rather implied the robbery of the sanctuary’s treasures
or the competitive spirit of the games organised there (Sakowski, 1997: 113–163).
At the end of the Geometric period, under oriental influence cauldrons were
equipped with attachments in the form of protomai of sirens, bulls, lions but most
usually griffins, and continued to be offered in large numbers at Greek sanctuaries
(for Olympia see Herrmann, 1979). The Archaic cauldrons with protomai were
constructed separately from the rod tripod they used to stand on, which could also
be elaborately decorated (Raubitschek, 1997: 77–96). With 14 hammered and 286
cast griffin protomes the sanctuary of Hera on Samos presents one of the most
impressive contexts of Late Geometric and early Archaic cauldrons decorated with
attached figures (Matthäus, 2008; Gehrig, 2004: 3). A fifth century BCE allusion to
the concentration of such votive offerings on Samos is represented by the legend of
Kolaios, who offered a monumental cauldron with griffins to the Heraion of Samos
as a tribute after a profitable sea voyage to distant Tartessos in the Iberian peninsula
(Herodotus 4.152).
In early Greek figurative art, the tripod was already shown as a prize, depicted
between two horses or next to a single horse, which was already an aristocratic
attribute. Next to these Late Geometric figurative scenes there were also vases of the
same chronological phase showing tripods in rows. From the end of the Geometric
period onwards tripods appeared between boxing men and later in association with
other athletic games (wrestling, running) or chariot races, although in most cases
they had long since ceased to be offered as prizes at such events (Sakowski, 1997).
In fact their original use during earlier times, before the establishment of the athletic
and chariot games at Olympia and Delphi, is also not undisputed (Morgan, 1990:
46–47).
Nevertheless, with a weight ranging between 6 and 30 kg and in some cases
reaching 100 kg they constituted some of the most precious objects circulating in
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 169

Early Iron Age Greece, not only because of their material but also due to their value as
finished artefacts, incorporating social symbolisms and representing elite attributes.
Already during the Late Bronze Age the use of tripods was associated with elites,
and was thought to have represented power relations as their contextual analysis
implied (Matthäus, 1980). Their common function as precious votive offerings in
sanctuaries in later periods demonstrates their continuous perception as objects of
particular value.
During recent decades there has been unanimity in classical scholarship regarding
the interpretation of tripod offering; this is viewed as a practice of deliberate wealth
disposal by competitive elite groups that wanted to enhance their reputation and
further establish their authority (according to another view their concentration also
suggests some kind of political centralisation; see Kiderlen, 2010 with literature;
Morris, 1986). However, the assumed aristocratic competition that was thought to
have been manifested by the offering of metal votives in the Greek sanctuaries is
only one—and indeed a rather simplistic—aspect in the interpretation of this social
practice.
Earlier archaeological approaches that focused on the undeniable symbolic value
of tripods in the definition of social status blurred our understanding of certain
economic implications in the practice of their offering. Tripods have been the subject
of numerous studies so far, almost all of which have in common their understanding
as prestige artefacts manipulated by peers for the purpose of social antagonisms via
their offering and display in public places. These studies focused on aspects of use
value, consumption and symbolisms of tripods, aligning with the zeitgeist of postpro-
cessual critique in archaeology (McGuire, 2008: 84). Their material properties were
thus downplayed and tripods were removed “both culturally and materially, from the
social relations involved in their production, exchange, and distribution” (Patterson,
2005: 378). This paper will attempt to explore further social and economic aspects
in the exchange of these conspicuous objects by overcoming biases of individual
agency and treating other aspects of social behaviour.

New Empirical Data in the Exploration of Tripod

Production and Exchange Modes

Recent scientific analyses have presented new empirical data that radically challenges
the traditional perception of the use and exchange value of tripods. Chemical and
lead isotope analyses showed that tripods at Olympia, and partly also at Delphi,
were made from the Protogeometric to the beginning of the Late Geometric period
with copper from the Faynan mines in modern Jordan (Kiderlen et al., 2016; for the
provenance of copper during the Late Geometric, cf. Bode et al., 2020). The analytical
evidence implies the operation of a stable exchange network that supplied the Aegean
with large quantities of copper required for the production of bulky artefacts such
as tripods, over a long period of time. The continuous supply of Faynan copper, that
170 S. Gimatzidis

partly replaced the previous domination of Cypriot ores in Aegean metalworking,

lasted at least three centuries and began after the end of Late Bronze Age (Jung &
Mehofer, 2013). It is questionable if the numerous small states that emerged from
the end of the Late Bronze Age could have developed similar institutionalised gift
exchange mechanisms to those that operated in the previous period under the control
of palatial hierarchies. In other words, the available archaeological record suggests
that the circulation of copper over such extended and culturally variable political
landscapes, during the Early Iron Age involved the participation of several different
agents in distant places, complicating the development of personalised relations.
The exploration of some aspects, until now neglected and probably misunderstood,
in the production and circulation of such conspicuous artefacts as the tripods requires
the definition of their origin of production. Previously it was unthinkable that these
precious artefacts were produced at the sanctuaries where they were dedicated. By
means of typological and stylistic analyses scholars used to attribute them to one or
the other assumed centre of Greek metalwork production such as Corinth and Argos
(Coldstream, 2003: 105; Morgan, 1990: 36–37; cf. Maaß, 1981: 18, who suggests
the production by wandering workshops). Neutron Activation Analysis of the clay
core and residues of the casting moulds on the surface of tripods from Olympia have
shown that they were indeed locally produced. Interestingly, only one of the five
tripods analysed that were offered to the sanctuary of Kalapodi in Locris appeared to
have been locally produced in Locris. All the other four tripods from Kalapodi were
also made at Olympia (Kiderlen et al., 2017). The new empirical data allows a new
reading of the tripods’ value not only in terms of raw material but also as finished
products. While personalised social relations could not have defined—at least over
a long period—the international exchange mechanisms that supplied Greece with
copper during the Early Iron Age, the circulation and offering of the finished products
(tripods) followed different social trajectories.

Gifts to Gods and Gifts to Men: Disguised Economic

Strategies in Greek Sanctuaries

The dedication of tripods to Greek sanctuaries cannot be understood in the same social
and cultural context as that of other metal offerings that were personal belongings
such as pins, fibulae or weapons. Tripods appear to have had a particular exchange
and symbolic value that other artefacts in Homeric epics did not. Most interestingly,
they incorporated an impressively consistent practice in votive offering that lasted
centuries, from the Early Iron Age to the Classical period; furthermore, they marked
the Greek cultural landscape through their massive production and dedication at
certain sanctuaries, contrasting with their almost complete absence from domestic
contexts.
The archaeological contexts where tripods were finally deposited at Olympia were
abandoned wells and an extended black layer that further contained charcoal, animal
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 171

bones, pottery and votive figurines representing sacrifice residue. Most usually parts
of cast legs were preserved, which were intentionally fragmented. It is obvious that
tripods were neither found at the original site of their deposition in the sanctuary,
nor were they discarded after having fallen into disuse and becoming obsolete. It
was instead assumed that preserved fragments from single tripods were secondarily
deposited as partes pro toto, while all the other parts of these artefacts had been
melted down. The purpose of recycling was associated by Helmut Kyrieleis (2006:
97–98), one of Olympia’s excavators, with the economy of the sanctuary itself, since
it was thought that dedicated artefacts could not be removed outside the sacred place.
The deposition of tripods in the Greek sanctuaries had scarcely anything in
common with the practice of hoarding metal artefacts in continental Europe, a prac-
tice that also included accumulation and fragmentation of metal artefacts, often of the
same type (Bradley, 1990: 7–9). Such hoards appeared for the first time in the Copper
Age, while from 1700/1600 BCE they also included intentionally fragmented arte-
facts. The interpretation of the European hoards, which often comprised older objects
covering a time span of three of four centuries, still puzzles scholarship. Earlier the
practice of hoarding was interpreted as a response to economic crises in periods of
social turbulence. Since a few decades, however, the deposition of precious artefacts
in watery or land environments has been predominantly understood as a ritual prac-
tice; this conclusion nevertheless does not exclude other interpretation models for
certain finds. The dedication of objects of great value as a gift to the gods cannot
be explained in terms of rational economic thinking. Less structured, egalitarian
communities may have offered precious votives to their gods in order to ease tensions
that may have resulted after wealth accumulation by individual members. The latter
not only avoided social exclusion in this way but also achieved enhancement of
their social status (Hänsel, 1997: 14). Objects such as Richard Wagner’s ring of
the Nibelungen, inspired by German and Scandinavian traditions, could not become
private wealth due to their supernatural powers; it was primarily for the protection of
their potential owners that such objects had to be taken out of circulation (Bradley,
2017: 142–156). Nevertheless, many questions remain open, especially with regard
to hoards of fragmented metal artefacts that are alternatively interpreted in economic,
symbolic or other social terms (Hansen, 2013, 2016).
While the purpose of European hoarding was to permanently remove from circu-
lation already formed groups of metal artefacts, possibly in a similar way to the
Potlach ritual of the Native Americans in north-west America, the artefact assem-
blages dedicated to the Greek sanctuaries were gradually accumulated through a
complex exchange mechanism in order to be displayed. Even if European hoards
comprised artefact complexes that were displayed prior to their deposition, as Richard
Bradley (2017: 80–105) has recently suggested, there is still a considerable differ-
ence from the practice of tripod dedication, since the latter were never permanently
taken out of circulation.
By dedicating tripods to sanctuaries, their donors rather re-contextualised than
put out of circulation these artefacts that were appreciated as top-ranking gifts in the
Homeric world. At this point it is useful to observe that the earliest of these votive
offerings were originally produced as functional cooking vessels. This is at least
172 S. Gimatzidis

suggested by traces of use and repair on some of the earliest tripods from Olympia
(Janietz, 2001: 28–29) that were probably used for common domestic purposes such
as cooking or preparing water for a warm bath, as Homer implies. Such vessels
were probably dedicated in sanctuaries after being used in local feasts of peers, who
could afford the use of metal vases instead of common coarse ceramic jars, such as
those frequently found in settlement contexts. Soon, tripods began to be produced
exclusively as non-functional votive objects and were dedicated immediately after
production.
Restricted accessibility to precious artefacts such as tripods emphasised the social
implications of this votive offering and enhanced the donor’s status in an alleged—as
already stated—competitive exchange ceremony (cf. Gregory, 1980: 646). Sacrifices
did not significantly differ from this practice as they also represented gifts to the gods
through alienation of goods. On the one hand, the notion of alienation has been vari-
ously understood either through a Marxist perspective that regards labour as a matter
of the self as well as value for the self or as a change of property rights from a Maus-
sian point of view. On the other hand, Marcel Mauss (1966 [1925]: 43–47) defined
as inalienable those gifts that even after exchange are still felt as originally owned by
their giver, whose properties they continue to bear. This dichotomy complicates the
understanding of past economic transactions since gift-debt and commodity-debt
are usually thought to differ, in that they are created by the exchange of inalien-
able and alienable objects, respectively. Christopher Gregory (1980: 640; 1982: 7–8)
and Marilyn Strathern (1988) suggested that an object becomes alienable through
its exchange as commodity, and accordingly understood inalienability in the social
context of gift exchange. Nevertheless, while gifts are generally inalienable things,
they may still be alienated once they are dedicated to gods. This is the economic
trajectory followed in the ritual exchange and accumulation of tripods in Greek
sanctuaries: “alienation is a pre-condition for accumulation, and while alienation
is impossible in a gifts-to-man system, it is the very basis of a gifts-to-god system
which means that the potential for accumulation exists in such a system” (Gregory,
1980: 641).
The interpretation of the dedication of tripods to otherworldly powers as a ritual
practice of aristocrats, aiming to convert valuables into prestige, is in contrast with
the textual evidence. Tripods are namely offered and used in every possible context
and manner in the Homeric epics, but never appear as dedications in sanctuaries. It
is worth stressing that the sanctuary of Delphi, where large assemblages of tripods
were deposited, is already mentioned once in the Odyssey (8.79–82). The fact that
tripods are exchanged in the epics on several different occasions but never as votive
offerings, which surprisingly is their predominant archaeological manifestation, may
not imply biases in the formation of the archaeological record, or poetic conventions,
but instead underlying perceptions in their use as dedications.
The practice of dedication did not necessarily alienate tripods’ producers from
their labour, since these objects were not directly appropriated or consumed by any
elite group; they were instead exchanged in a gift-to-god system that allowed the
accumulation of assets in public institutions. Sanctuaries thus represented not just
fields of competitive gift exchange, as has been repeatedly assumed in the past, but
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 173

rather institutions for the accumulation and potential redistribution of wealth. Sanc-
tuaries accommodated the concentration of wealth, which was otherwise practiced
by elites in structured societies and redistributed, for example through liturgies in
ancient Athens (Graeber, 2001: 160; Mauss, 1966 [1925]: 66). The available evidence
implies that, in addition to the ritual symbolism in the formation of power relations,
there were also some significant economic aspects in the dedication of tripods that
have been previously misunderstood.

Patterns of Ritual Wealth Accumulation in Ancient Greece

Tripod dedication in some aspects resembles votive deposition and display practices
that took place in later periods in Greek sanctuaries. The large tripod concentrations at
Olympia and Delphi in fact represent the archaeologically most visible accumulation
of wealth in Early Iron Age and early Archaic Greece. From the second half of
the seventh century BCE onwards, when the ritual practice of tripod dedication at
these two sanctuaries declined, wealth accumulation was manifested in the form of
treasuries. Treasure-houses were constructed as small temples in some of the most
famous Greek sanctuaries, housing not only valuable dedications but also money
offered by city-states and their rich citizens. The most prominent and numerous
treasuries were erected in the two Panhellenic sanctuaries, at Olympia and Delphi,
which previously had attracted tripod dedications. With few exceptions erected by
tyrants, treasuries were dedications made by communities, not individuals. They
were dedicated by city-states and were tightly linked with them. Cities even used
to import building material from their territories for their construction in order to
symbolically mark these links. Ancient literary evidence implies that some of the
reasons for the erection of treasuries included the expression of devotion to the gods,
the commemoration of victories and, of course, the display of wealth. The latter was
a common denominator in the erection of both Archaic treasuries and earlier tripods.
In both cases, the dedication was a political decision that expressed an elitist ideology
(Neer, 2001). While, however, treasuries represented distinct political entities, where
individual votive offerings were situated in the framework of single city-states and
were ethnically identified, tripods were dedicated during the Early Iron Age as non-
personalised objects, at a time when the major sanctuaries functioned as regional
rather than Panhellenic institutions.
Tripods continued to incorporate symbolic values in the Archaic and Classical
periods, when they were commonly erected to commemorate victorious events of
any kind. The most renowned of all was certainly the Plataean tripod which was made
of gold and which stood on the head of three intertwined bronze snakes. Greek cities
erected this monument at Delphi to commemorate their victory against the Persians
at the battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. From the Archaic period onwards, tripods were
most usually offered as prizes in festivals such as the famous dramatic contests of
the Dionysia in Athens. In turn, winners used to dedicate their prizes in sanctuaries
in order—among other reasons—to commemorate their victory in public. This is
174 S. Gimatzidis

precisely what Hesiod (Opera 654–657) did after having been awarded a tripod in a
poetic contest in Chalkis, a prize which he eventually offered to the Sanctuary of the
Muses at Helicon in his homeland.
The dedication of tripods that has been archaeologically attested at Olympia,
Delphi and Samos during the Early Iron Age and early Archaic periods subsequently
became a common practice at other Greek sanctuaries. Particularly indicative in
this respect is a story recorded by Pausanias (4.12.8–10) about a territorial dispute
between the Messenians and the Lacedaemonians. According to a Delphic oracle,
those who would offer one hundred bronze tripods at the sanctuary of Zeus on Mount
Ithome would gain the Messenian land. The Messenians did not have the money
required and therefore produced one hundred wooden instead of bronze tripods.
However, the Lacedaemonians, who had planned a similar trick, were the first to offer
one hundred terracotta tripods to the sanctuary. This narrative contains an implicit
indication about the economic value of tripods, namely, their perception as objects
of particular exchange value.
The archaeological record of Boeotia demonstrates how the dedication of monu-
mental tripods was manipulated by public institutions at Ptoon and Orchomenos
(Papalexandrou, 2008). Twenty-five bases of tripods, inscribed with the names of
victors in the musical contests in honour of Dionysos, have survived at Orchomenos
where they were erected in a public place within or close to the agora. The interesting
aspect in the dedication of these monuments is that they were awarded by the state
as prizes to prominent citizens of Orchomenos; it was then intended that they would
be returned to the city and displayed in a central public place, this time inscribed
with the names of the victors. The display of the social status of certain individuals
was only one objective fulfilled through this ritual practice. Another assemblage of
tripod bases—this time of monumental size—preserved at the sanctuary of Ptoios at
Kastraki allowed a reconstruction of their original setting, suggesting that they were
erected as part of the sanctuary’s scenery. The tripods formed two alignments—with
nine and 19 tripod bases preserved, respectively—that used to frame and monu-
mentalize the approach to the sanctuary as the Street of the Tripods did in Athens.
Interestingly, this imposing syntax of tripods, with heights ranging between 1.50 and
2.50 m., was not only planned but fully implemented by the state, the city of Akraiphia
itself. The significance of the tripod in Boeotian public life is further attested by the
collective rite of tripodephoria (ceremonial transferences of tripods) on several occa-
sions, yet also by its common appearance in the iconography of Geometric and early
Archaic local pottery (Sakowski, 1997; on the perception of the tripod in Messene
after its foundation by the Boeotians in 370/369 BCE, see Papalexandrou, 2014).
Epigraphic evidence in Boeotia attests that tripods were dedicated either by indi-
viduals who won in a musical contest at Orchomenos, or by the state itself at Ptoon.
Two questions that immediately arise are, firstly, why the state undertook such an
expense by erecting numerous tripods in its sanctuaries and, secondly, if the dedi-
cation of tripods gained by individuals was indeed a personal choice dependent on
freewill. An answer to the latter question is provided by a story recorded by Herodotus
about the games organised by the Doric league, which originally comprised six cities,
in honour of Triopian Apollo close to Cnidus in south-western Asia Minor. When a
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 175

man from Halicarnassus broke the law that obliged winners to dedicate their prizes
to the temple of Apollo by taking his tripod back home, they expelled his home-city
from the league. This is how the original Doric federation of six cities (Hexapolis)
became Pentapolis (Herodotus 1.144). Greek literature implies that the deposit of
tripods, which were previously awarded in contests or games, to sanctuaries was a
common practice in Greece. Although tripod-prizes were not directly perceived as
public property, they were still treated as objects that could not be alienated and
privatised. Textual and archaeological evidence elucidates further the erection of
tripod monuments as communal projects. Their use as markers in the planning of
public space not only in Boeotia but also in Athens and elsewhere, as well as the costs
involved, suggest that they cannot solely be explained in terms of cultural symbolism
for the profit of individuals.
The tripods at Olympia had been made locally with imported copper ores and had
been dedicated in large numbers by Elian aristocrats before the sanctuary became
a Panhellenic institution. While the practice of tripod deposition gradually ceased
at Olympia after the end of the Geometric period, it continued without any inter-
ruption in the early Archaic period at Delphi. This sanctuary, which has yielded the
second largest assemblage of tripods in Greece, had a different political and social
organisation (Osborne, 2009: 191). Namely, it was run by a religious league of neigh-
bouring states known as the Amphictyony. The tripods at Delphi were the material
manifestation of ceremonial dedications by more than one state.
Greek sanctuaries were not only arenas of social antagonisms but were primarily
places where wealth was accumulated throughout their long history (Arafat, 2009).
The Gauls who invaded Greece in the early Hellenistic period were aware that
Greece’s treasures were kept in its sanctuaries (Pausanias 10.19.9). The manage-
ment of this wealth and its economic implications have been a rather misunderstood
topic in Greek archaeology. There is, however, adequate textual evidence demon-
strating that sacred funds, primarily in the form of valuable dedications, were not
expropriated only for the purposes of the sanctuary itself or by looters, but were also
at the disposal of the states in charge of these institutions. This is at least suggested by
the Lacedaemonians choosing to entrust their gold and silver at a particular time to
the sanctuary of Delphi, wealth which they in turn brought back to their city, Sparta,
on a later occasion (Posidonius, FGrHist 87 F 48c). Thucydides’ report (1.121.3
and 1.143.1) that the Peloponnesians could borrow money from the sanctuaries of
Olympia and Delphi without committing any impiety contains the same implica-
tions about the relationship of certain states with the Panhellenic sanctuaries. It is
relevant to consider in the same respect the textual—both literary and epigraphic—
evidence from Classical Athens regarding the sacred resources of the temple of
Athena Parthenos and other deities that were regularly used to fund military and
building projects (Samons II, 1993). These resources included among others “the
sacred vessels for the processions and games” and “the gold ornaments of Athena
herself; for the statue contained forty talents of pure gold and it was all removable”
(Thucydides 2.13.4–5).
176 S. Gimatzidis

The Commodification of Tripods

Tripods have been perceived in the past as votive offerings that were brought to
Olympia from other regions in southern Greece and dedicated by individuals, whereas
the sanctuary of Delphi was thought to have received them as public offerings
(Morgan, 1990: 43–47, 140). The dominant interpretation of the motives for their
dedication focused on social competition and accordingly defined the early history
of Greek sanctuaries. This Maussian perspective, however, provided only a spotlight
on the long social and cultural processes that began with the production of tripods
and further involved their exchange, appropriation and consumption. The practice of
tripod dedication cannot be approached through comparison to the institution of “the
potlatch” that incorporates the best known ethnographic paradigm of competitive gift
exchange (Mauss, 1966 [1925]). Closer consideration of the purposes and objectives
of this economic transaction that took place in Greek sanctuaries has shown that
this was not an expression of contempt for private possessions, as the potlatch was,
but a means to accumulate wealth (Graeber, 2001: 160). A gift exchange institution
such as the potlach requires unequal social relations and aims at constructing rela-
tions of dependency. The acceptance of a gift in the potlach is an act of recognition
of the higher social status of the giver (Graeber, 2001: 225). In the case of tripod
exchange the final recipient is always a public institution. By focusing on issues of
exchange, previous scholarship downplayed modes of production and failed to eluci-
date certain disguised socio-economic aspects in tripods’ consumption (Josephides,
1983). A major bias in previous archaeological and historical representations was
the simplistic perception of private ownership that overlooked social complexity in
pre-modern societies and alternative conceptualizations of value and access to the
resources beyond individualism (Strathern, 1988: 142–143).
Social antagonisms and ceremonial votive practices are obviously not sufficient
arguments to explain the accumulation of precious artefacts of the same form and
type that made sanctuaries such as those at Olympia, Delphi and Samos look like
treasuries filled with bronze ores imported from remote places in the Levant. Early
Iron Age tripods did not have any individual personality, as other votive offerings did.
Even when they were inscribed in later periods, they still rarely exerted individual
agency. An exception is Athens during the late Classical period when the city experi-
enced significant social transformations. Tripod dedication then looked more like an
individual social performance, and tripod monuments were known by their donor’s
names such as Lysicrates, Thrasyllos and Nikias. Although tripod offering was an
institutionalised practice aiming to display wealth and power, allegedly by individ-
uals, the long-term objective was obviously not associated with personal strategies, at
least in pre-Classical periods. A reciprocal gift from the gods was thus not expected
after tripod dedication, since this votive practice incorporated economic benefits
exclusively for the community (cf. Osborne, 2004: 2).
Tripod deposition was the oldest and longest practice of wealth accumulation
that is archaeologically attested in ancient Greece. These artefacts were deposited
at sacred places after having circulated within an exchange mechanism that was
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 177

controlled by the states in charge of the sanctuaries. In earlier periods, the main
actors in this gift exchange system were probably individual peers, competing with
each other and probably representing different clans. The result was the concentration
of wealth in the form of precious metal artefacts for the benefit of the community.
The awarding of tripods as prizes was—at least in later periods—nothing more than
the performative, ceremonial framework of a similar exchange mechanism that facil-
itated the concentration of tripods at sanctuaries. The symbolism of these artefacts
was recycled through manipulation of their materiality: they were awarded as prizes
by the community to its most distinctive members to enable them to negotiate their
social status and enhance prestige, before they were finally returned to the commu-
nity as votive dedications by the aristocrats. Tripods were “donated” as personalised
and inalienable gifts by the state to elite individuals, and were subsequently alienated
and re-appropriated by the state as gifts to the gods. The inscribed names on them
did not record physical owners but, instead, holders of their symbolic value.
The alienation of tripods through their exchange between state and individuals, and
their final dedication to the gods, neither immediately implies their commodification
nor the function of sanctuaries as “market” places. The latter notion has often been
abused in classical studies resulting in the construction of narratives biased by modern
preconceptions. Small-scale votive offerings at Greek sanctuaries, other than personal
belongings such as figurines and miniature vases that were produced in situ, were
usually thought to have been “sold” to visitors (Morgan, 1990: 44). The question
that consequently arises is with what money did such transactions take place, and
to what extent were property rights defined; in other words, if any kind of market
economy can be reconstructed, in contrast to Karl Polanyi’s expectations. “Market” is
a rather fluid notion that has been variously defined depending on the social contexts
of transactions or the purchasability of goods (Hahn, 2018; Harris & Lewis, 2016).
Moreover, from non-market to market societies there is a lot of space for alternative
concepts that can be subsumed as “partial markets” (Andreau, 2002: 36–37; see more
analytically North, 1977; there is therefore not much sense in the dispute over the
dating of the introduction of the market in Greece, see e.g. Redfield, 1986; Morris,
1986). Equally fluid is the social process of commodification, exemplified by the
transformation of personal into anonymous goods that can be sold and bought by
anyone (commodities).
The notion of commodity emerged according to the original Marxist definition
in the social context of capitalist economies, and was used to describe an object
produced for exchange. However, Marx (1977 [1867], 97) left some space for the
application of the notion of commodity also in the exploration of pre-capitalist
economic relations, by suggesting that it appeared for the first time in a disguised
manner much earlier in history. In recent decades anthropologists attempted to
explore the multifaceted nature of this concept by highlighting its fluid borders
to barter and gift (see Appadurai, 1986: 9–13; see also the introduction chapter
in this book). The practice of tripod accumulation at Greek sanctuaries still cannot
be fully understood through Appadurai’s (1986: 13–16) perspective that seeks to
break “with the production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity” and focuses
instead on the history of individual objects, which at some time in their “career” may
178 S. Gimatzidis

“meet the requirements of commodity candidacy”. In this manner Appadurai, in his

much cited paper, examined alternative ways to understand processes of commod-
ification in pre-modern societies. By focusing on consumption and the self-centred
spirit of commodities he failed, however, to present a holistic approach that would
also consider their materiality and modes of production (Graeber, 2001: 30–33).
Economics, including also studies of ancient economy, cannot be purged of ideolo-
gies. It therefore makes more sense to highlight political ideologies behind economic
theorizing, as David Graeber does, and to assess their impact on interpretative models,
than to question the politically unmasked approach to economics as “personal vision”
and “social activism” (Papadopoulos & Urton, 2012: 20).
The exchange of tripods can also not be interpreted in terms of the mainstream divi-
sion between gifts and commodities, that perceived the first as the qualitative outcome
of personal relations and the second as goods of quantitative equivalence that were
impersonally exchanged (Gregory, 1982). This theoretical perspective understands
gifts as goods offered to enhance the social status of the giver through wealth distri-
bution, and commodities as goods accumulated to create private wealth (Graeber,
2001: 36). Tripod exchange incorporated both properties.
A handicap in archaeology is its inability to directly observe and document social
dynamics that defined modes of past transactions. This is a privilege of anthro-
pology, which however can no longer be taken to represent a theoretical quiver of
models and paradigms for the reconstruction of past social relations. Archaeolog-
ical evidence at Greek sanctuaries suggests that tripods were initially exchanged in
ceremonial feasts, where inalienable objects were commodified and subsequently
accumulated. This transaction did not serve the individual purposes of a particular
chief, as did, for example, the use of shell valuables in barter and gift exchange by
the Roviana people on New Georgia, Solomon Islands (Aswani & Sheppard, 2003).
Archaeological, historical and ethnographic data rejected any clear-cut dichotomy
between gift and commodity in the exchanges of this Melanesian people. It was
argued instead that a shift between such exchange modalities was not uncommon
in pre-modern societies, depending on the transaction of objects among different
social and cultural spheres. Roviana shell artefacts and Greek tripods underwent
different processes of commodification and de-commodification. Some of the most
valuable shell rings were initially exchanged as alienated commodities and then
de-commodified through their dedication to sanctuaries or hoarding, to serve the
purposes of the chief’s authority by financing his ceremonial exchanges or wars. As
inalienable objects, shell rings could return to circulation or be permanently removed
from it. Tripods, on the other hand, were alternatively exchanged as gifts or commodi-
ties, but their alienation and accumulation was not intended to further enhance the
social status of any individual, which was achieved by the performance of dedication.
Similarly, their detachment from circulation was not a means to display elite control
over the means of production or exchange through appropriation by elite groups of
subordinates’ labour. Following a different economic trajectory, tripod accumulation
was a process of commodity alienation that in a ceremonial way placed wealth at the
disposal of the community. Although tripods were initially provided with a certain
9 Tripod Dedication: Gift and Commodity Exchange in Ancient Greece 179

biography, which in later periods was expressed through an inscription, they were
institutionally alienated through their exchange and accumulation in sanctuaries, to
be ultimately appropriated as commodities for communal use.

Conclusions

The understanding of the use and exchange value of tripods in this paper deviates from
previous interpretations through its production-oriented approach to their materiality.
It is in fact assumed that tripods were produced in large numbers and dedicated at
the sanctuary of Olympia by elite members of regional communities who were in
charge of the sanctuary without, however, alienating producers from their surplus in
the Marxist sense. This perception of tripod exchange therefore renders the question
of how donors paid for them appear futile (Kyrieleis, 2006: 101).
The grand narratives about the social and economic structure of Early Iron Age
Greece used to depend more on textual rather than the available archaeological
evidence (Finley, 1973; Murray, 1993; Stein-Hölkeskamp, 2015; cf. Whitley, 1991;
and several papers in Morris & Powell, 1997; Sherratt & Bennet, 2017). The Hero of
Lefkandi who was given an exceptional burial with his spouse in an elaborate building
is, nevertheless, still without any parallel in Protogeometric and Geometric Greece.
On the other hand, the spatial organisation of the settlement structure that came to
light under the Archaic temple of Apollo Daphnephoros in Eretria, Euboea implies
that industrial metalworking activities and “aristocratic feasts” could have taken place
in the same settlement quarter (Verdan, 2013). The ritual practice of tripod dedication
may be more eloquent about the socio-economic organisation of early Greece than
the available mortuary record that forms the largest part of the archaeological dataset
of this period but at the same time conveys socially and culturally biased evidence.
The transaction of tripods is here understood as a communal matter, whose
outcome affected all community members equally. Similarly, tripod accumulation
did not imply the creation of capital, but rather a concentration of wealth that was
available for eventual redistribution or common use of another kind. This practice
was common in Greek sanctuaries from the Early Iron Age onwards, with tripods
symbolising peer antagonism in the first place, but also principally incorporating
public strategies of wealth management. The scientifically attested circulation of
tripods that were produced at Olympia at other sanctuaries such as Kalapodi can be
understood in the context of interstate economic relations. The finds from Kalapodi
are the archaeological manifestation of the Homeric picture of travelling ships loaded
with valuable tripods. They represent common modes of exchange among peers
from distant communities, and economic strategies that formed the background of
the shaping of social relations in Early Iron Age and Archaic Greece. While ores
from Faynan reached Greece as commodities exchanged between several different
actors probably using the same non-personalised trajectories of economic transac-
tions through the centuries, tripods may have circulated in Greece as personalised
gifts to be finally deposited at Olympia, Kalapodi and elsewhere as alienated goods.
180 S. Gimatzidis

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Chapter 10
Happily Connected? The
Interconnectivity Paradigm
and the Debate About the Ancient
Economy

Jan Paul Crielaard

Abstract This contribution deals with the recent paradigm shift in thinking about
Mediterranean connectedness and how this affected prevalent ideas about the func-
tioning of the ancient economy. It sketches the intellectual, cultural and academic
contexts in which connectivity thinking has developed over the last 50 years and
discusses some of its basic tenets, notably the notion of unlimited, Mediterranean-
wide connectedness and individual economic agency. A blind spot in the current
vision of a connected Mediterranean concerns the evidence of regional differen-
tiality in connectivity and the ways and means that connectedness and networks
were manipulated to create or reinforce power relations—a point which is illustrated
with the help of a long-term study of seaborne and terrestrial connections in the
southern part of the Greek island of Euboia.

Introduction

Over the last decades, Mediterranean archaeologists and historians have shifted
from models emphasizing small, static units and rigid socioeconomic structures
towards a new paradigm emphasizing connectedness and the fluidity of the move-
ment of people, goods and ideas, both in a geographical and a social sense. Pere-
grine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea has been a landmark in
this development (Horden & Purcell, 2000). Other sources of inspiration for this
interconnectivity paradigm are today’s network society, the current internet culture
and information society, and such related phenomena as globalization and increased
economic interdependence.
The interconnectivity paradigm has led to all kinds of sweeping statements about
mobility, ever-expanding networks, small worlds, mutability, cultural homogeniza-
tion, loss of sense of place, breakdown of spatially bounded cultures, etc.—almost
to the point that interconnectivity is taken as gospel truth and is becoming a new

J. P. Crielaard (B)
Faculty of Humanities/CLUE+, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: j.p.crielaard@vu.nl
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 183
S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_10
184 J. P. Crielaard

ideology. In this contribution, I offer some reflections on the interconnectivity model

and its basic tenets. I do not offer a detailed critique of the various contributions
to this debate, but rather sketch the intellectual, cultural and academic contexts in
which connectivity thinking has developed over the last 40 or 50 years. After briefly
discussing the dominant ways of thinking about Mediterranean connectivity in the
decades preceding the publication of The Corrupting Sea, I evaluate the direction the
debate has subsequently taken and identify some issues that still need to be addressed.
One of the positive things about the current interest in Mediterranean connectivity is
that its scope is much wider in comparison to the earlier focus on trade and economy.
On the other hand, it goes without saying that ideas about a connected ancient world
have a direct bearing on how the ancient economy is perceived and for this reason
the debate about interconnectivity should be taken it into consideration if we wish
to offer a critique on archaeological economy.1

Ideas About Mediterranean Connectedness

At the risk of oversimplifying, we can discern three important schools of thought or

models that were current in the 1980s and 1990s and had a considerable influence on
how Mediterranean connectivity was perceived before The Corrupting Sea. The first
may be dubbed the “cellular self-sufficiency” model. One of its basic tenets is that
the operation of ancient societies and economies was determined by powerful institu-
tions and deeply rooted structures. Most ancient Mediterranean people were suppos-
edly engaged in self-supporting agriculture, which created little surplus and small
aggregate demand. Simple technology, a limited information flow and high transport
costs prevented people from moving far and often, and divided the Mediterranean
into small, static regions and geographically bounded cultures. Needless to say, this
model of cellular self-sufficiency was heavily influenced by substantivism, owing
much to the work of Moses Finley and, through him, Max Weber. Keywords are
fragmentation, immobility and the disconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean
world. Trade and, more generally, connectivity were thought to be embedded in
social institutions and to be especially the domain of elites. As Ian Morris remarks,
for proponents of this model it was perfectly acceptable that “emperor Hadrian might
tour from one end of the Mediterranean basin to the other and have similar philo-
sophical conversations, drink similar wines, and eat off similar gold plates at every
stop, while for 99 per cent of its people the ‘Mediterranean world’ was just a few
hours’ walk across” (Morris, 2003: 30–31, 37–38).

1 I wish to express my thanks to Dr. Reinhard Jung and Dr. Stefanos Gimatzidis for the invitation to

participate in the symposium and to contribute to this volume. I also wish to thank the symposium
organizers and participants for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. My contribution
draws upon a synthesizing study as part of a research project titled “The sea and land routes of
southern Euboea, ca. 4000–1 BCE. A case study in Mediterranean interconnectivity”, funded by
the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) as project no. PR-14-08 (abbreviated
SESLR).
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 185

A second school of thought, in contrast, explicitly acknowledges Mediterranean

connectivity, but perceives these connections in terms of centre–periphery relations,
drawing on the world systems theory that Immanuel Wallerstein developed to explain
the origins of Europe’s early modern world economy (Wallerstein, 1974). Despite
criticism that it is inappropriate to apply world systems theory to pre-capitalist
societies, and Wallerstein’s cautionary remarks about the matter, centre–periphery
models have been fervently embraced particularly by prehistorians working not only
in the Mediterranean and the Near East but also in north-western Europe, and have
been widely used to explain connections between dissimilar parts of the world (e.g.
Rowlands et al., 1987; Champion, 1989; Sherratt & Sherratt, 1991, 1993; Sher-
ratt, 1993; Kristiansen, 1998; Harding, 2000. Critical: Stein, 1998. Centre–periphery
models remain popular in addition to the connectedness model: see e.g. Kümmel,
2001; Sommer, 2004; Vianello, 2008). Centre–periphery models imply frequent and
intensive economic interactions, often over long distances, between more developed
centres and less complex societies in marginal areas. The periphery supplies raw
materials and human resources, often in return for manufactured goods provided
by the centre. The result is an asymmetrical socio-political and economic relation-
ship; that is, there is a mutual dependency among the parties involved, but the centre
dominates the relationships.
A third, influential school of thought that we can identify also acknowledges
Mediterranean connectedness but very much in terms of people and ideas travelling
from east to west. It is rooted in the cultural historical traditions of ex oriente lux.
This was the dominant model among twentieth-century prehistorians, starting with
Gordon Childe, who suggested that agriculture, together with a package of tech-
nological and cultural advancements, spread from the Near East through Anatolia
and the Balkans to Europe (Childe, 1925). This more recent version of ex oriente
lux-thinking focuses less on economic relationships than on cultural transmission.
Such scholars as Walter Burkert, Martin Bernal, Sarah Morris and Martin West
emphasize the impact of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Near East on
the “younger” Mediterranean cultures, including classical Greece (Burkert, 1992
[1984], 2004; Bernal, 1987–2006; S. Morris, 1992; West, 1997; see also Kristiansen
& Larsson, 2005). The idea that Greeks were “learning in the east and south” has been
accepted by classicists—however, in a somewhat milder form and with the addition
that the Greeks in their turn were “teaching in the west and north” by disseminating
Greek civilization “to people in Italy and western Europe who were less advanced
culturally and technologically” (Boardman, 1998: 8). In essence, this is a variation
of the ex oriente lux idea, only with an intermediary role for the Greeks and the
Greek genius. Much importance is attached to individuals acting as intermediaries,
like Burkert’s immigrant craftsmen and travelling healers and singers. What this
view on east–west relations has in common with the more economically oriented
centre–periphery models is that the flow of people, goods, practices, ideas, ideolo-
gies and technologies is thought to be basically unidirectional, implicitly assuming
the existence of asymmetrical relationships and attributing a passive role to receptor
communities.
186 J. P. Crielaard

The view of a fragmented Mediterranean underlying the cellular self-sufficiency

model—or of a hierarchically divided Mediterranean, as adherents of centre–
periphery models see it—was to a large extent a reflection of the fragmented state
of the academic landscape: the study of the ancient Mediterranean itself was frag-
mented and divided, along often highly arbitrary disciplinary, chronological and
geographical lines, created by long-established scholarly traditions or nationalist
or otherwise ideologically tainted sentiments. These boundaries not only separated
prehistory from classical archaeology or classics from medieval history, but also
created an even greater divide between the study of Classical antiquity and that of
the ancient cultures of the Near East or of “barbarian” Europe. Particularly within
the field of archaeology, nation states formed the principal frame of reference for
research on the past. This slowly started to change, however, when from the mid-
twentieth century onwards, as part of a broader movement in the humanities and social
sciences, historians increasingly recognized the importance of large-scale historical
processes that transcended the boundaries of national states. In search of large-scale
zones of interaction to bring these processes into focus, sea and ocean basins were
identified as useful frameworks for the analysis of some historical processes, for
instance regarding commercial, biological and cultural exchange that influenced the
development of both individual societies and the larger region as a whole (Bentley,
1999; see further e.g. Bodle, 2007; Land, 2007). This was combined, especially
from the 1990s onwards, with a new interest in connections and networks in the
past. Sources of inspiration for models focusing on interconnectivity are the World
Wide Web (e.g. Crielaard, 1998), the contemporary network society and informa-
tion economy, and such related phenomena as globalization, mobility, increased
economic interdependence and—once more—the demise of the sovereign nation
state (Castells, 2004). The different way of perceiving the economy and trade in
the past also seems to be influenced by the socioeconomic processes that we are
currently experiencing in our world: nation-based industries are giving way to busi-
ness networks that ignore national borders, which goes hand in hand with new socio-
political and economic discourses, including the orientation towards entrepreneurial
rather than state-building values, and towards identity formation rather than political
or economic ideologies (Douw, 2017: 513).
Examples of connecting sea basins that shaped different phases in history were
found in coastal Atlantic Europe (Cunliffe, 2001), the Atlantic Ocean basin (Bailyn,
2005; Egerton, 2007; Benjamin, 2009; Thornton, 2012), the Black Sea (King, 2004),
the Baltic (Rönnby, 2003), the North Sea basin (Jordan, 2004; Van de Noort, 2011;
Ayers, 2016) and, of course, the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean connectivity
model gained ground very quickly, first of all because there was already a highly
influential source of inspiration and point of orientation in the shape of Fernand
Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(Braudel, 1949), and secondly—and more importantly—thanks to the publication
of Horden and Purcell’s voluminous study The Corrupting Sea in 2000. This book
became a watershed in Mediterranean studies. In an article published only three years
after the appearance of The Corrupting Sea, Ian Morris felt confident to conclude
that a paradigm shift, which he labelled the “new Mediterraneanism”, was taking
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 187

place, and that “the connectedness model is here to stay: it reveals new dimensions
of antiquity and gives antiquity new significance for understanding the world around
us” (I. Morris, 2003: 50–51).

The Corrupting Sea and The Ancient Economy

The starting point of Horden and Purcell’s project is that the Mediterranean is “no
barrier to communications, but the medium of all human intercourse from one region
to another” (Horden & Purcell, 2000: 133). The subject of The Corrupting Sea is,
to quote from the Introduction, “the human history of the Mediterranean Sea and its
coastlands over some three millennia. Its immediate contention is that this history
can profitably be treated as material for a unified and distinct discipline” (Horden &
Purcell, 2000: 9). In the view of the authors, an interconnected Mediterranean means
“history either of the whole Mediterranean or of an aspect of it to which the whole is
an indispensable framework” (Horden & Purcell, 2000: 2). Their aim is to challenge
simplistic notions of Mediterranean cultural unity and instead consider how divergent
forms of variation, similarity and difference throughout the Mediterranean are inter-
acted. Horden and Purcell take into account the heterogeneity of the Mediterranean
region—being an assemblage of physically differentiated micro-regions—and stress
the crucial and distinctive significance of local variability in Mediterranean history;
however, they conceptualize this heterogeneity in holistic terms, pointing out that it is
the variety and fragmentation that make the Mediterranean an entity, “the differences
which resemble each other” (Horden & Purcell, 2000: 339). It is the relatively high
degree of differentiation between micro-regions and the “natural” human response to
risks caused by the marginality of the Mediterranean environments that forces these
regions to continually interact, creating interdependent relationships and networks
that foster cultural homogeneity across ecological divides.
The Corrupting Sea has directly or indirectly sparked a host of studies on the
Mediterranean (Abulafia, 2011; Blake & Knapp, 2005; Harris, 2005; Broodbank,
2013; Horden & Purcell, 2019), Mediterranean interconnectivity and globalization
(LaBianca & Scham, 2005; Harris, 2006; Hodos, 2006, 2017; Antoniadou & Pace,
2007; Maran, 2007; Tabak, 2008; Van Dommelen & Knapp, 2010; Demand, 2011;
Jennings, 2011; Kistler, 2012; Pitts & Versluys, 2015), Mediterranean and Aegean
networks (Crielaard, 1998; Malkin, 2011; Knapett et al., 2011; Knapett, 2013; van
den Berg, 2018; Iacono, 2019), Aegean island and coastal archaeology (Broodbank,
2000; Rainbird, 2007; Berg, 2010; Bevan & Conolly, 2013; Tartaron, 2013) and
interconnectivity between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic basin (Cunliffe, 2008,
2017). Many of these studies have in common that they adopt a long-term perspective
and cut across the traditional disciplinary, chronological and geographical division
lines. This “new Mediterraneanism” indeed proved to be a paradigm shift, most of
all because it represents a clear break with many of the tenets current in the 1980s
and 1990s. For example, in contrast to centre–periphery models, the Mediterranean
connectivity paradigm does not work with dominant cultures, nor does it distinguish
188 J. P. Crielaard

between central and peripheral areas. By their nature, interrelationships are believed
to be rather symmetrical, in contrast to the unidirectional flows of raw materials and
manufactured goods envisaged by centre–periphery models.
But the most radical and fundamental break has been with the traditional substan-
tivist school of thought. Finley had stressed that production was more or less the same
everywhere due to the sameness of the Mediterranean milieu, which discouraged
large-scale trade and fostered autarkic home consumption. Horden and Purcell, in
contrast, argue that the small differences in ecology forced micro-regions to continu-
ally interact and trade goods that in other regions were either entirely or temporarily
unavailable or of a different quality. Whereas substantivists (“minimalists” in the
terminology of Horden and Purcell) traditionally viewed the ancient economies as
stagnant, agrarian and embedded in social and formal institutional systems (Horden &
Purcell, 2000: 146–147 for critique on Finley’s views on trade and economy in Antiq-
uity), adherents of the Mediterranean connectedness models see fluidity, flexibility
and dynamic relations, often taking place outside institutional frameworks.
Horden and Purcell stress that even if substantivists are right in their belief that
ancient trade in some periods was about low-bulk, high-value goods, took the form
of “directed trade”, was connected to a command economy, or operated without a
price setting market, it could still include very considerable movements of capital
and people and be of socioeconomic significance and accompanied by considerable
connectivity (Horden & Purcell, 2000: 149). In their view, cabotage played an impor-
tant role in sustaining Mediterranean connectedness over the centuries. Hugging the
shores or island hopping, caboteurs are thought to have been responsible for local,
casual and short-distance contacts. They were highly flexible actors in the sense
that they could easily adapt to seasonal changes and make year-to-year adjustments.
Within the small-scale networks of coastal contacts, caboteurs knew what was avail-
able and what was wanted in each region. Horden and Purcell argue that, in aggre-
gate, cabotage (sometimes in combination with petty piracy) was responsible for
the bulk of the movement of people and goods around the sea. In this connection
they make a distinction between “high commerce” and “low commerce”. The former
typically concerns long-distance exchanges of luxury and prestige goods, generated
by the interests and purchasing power of aristocracy, state and army. It is the type
of exchange that we encounter in literary texts and that plays a leading role in the
dominant, historical narrative about ancient trade. This applies in particular to narra-
tives constructed by substantivist/minimalist historians who, according to Horden
and Purcell, give too much credit to normative thinking on the part of ancient elites
trying to marginalize those who were engaged in commerce. The authors want to
move away from this dualism, pointing out that high and low commerce were inextri-
cable. High commerce was sophisticated and well organized, whereas low commerce
was more casual, with caboteurs visiting informal harbours rather than the impor-
tant ports. Together, however, they formed the fundamental ingredients in the social
and economic history of the Mediterranean. At the same time, Horden and Purcell
point out that thanks to the dense and mutable pattern of movement of cabotage and
the existence of interconnected cabotage circuits, small traders were responsible for
the redistribution of a tremendous quality, quantity and variety of goods, exceeding
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 189

by far the volume of high commerce. Whereas high commerce fluctuated through
history, low commerce formed the stable undercurrent of Mediterranean intercon-
nectivity during both Antiquity and the Middle Ages, catering for the widespread and
lasting interdependence of Mediterranean micro-regions (Horden & Purcell, 2000:
140–144, 150–151; for different forms of cabotage and differences between cabotage
and tramping, see Arnaud, 2005, 2011: 61–63).

Some Critical Thoughts on Mediterranean Connectivity

For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the substantivist–formalist
debate kept many students of the ancient economy divided (Cartledge, 2002: 13–
16). Towards the end of the second millennium, positions had become less polarized
(see e.g. Bresson, 2016), but the “new Mediterraneanism” made this controversy
seem superfluous, irrelevant and outdated. As said, it critiques especially substan-
tivists’ axioms, but what may be also noted is that the connectedness model projects
some modern economic ideas or ideals into the past, and in that sense it provides a
vehicle for the continuity of formalist thinking. For example, in the connectedness
model there is little room for fixed exchanges or trade routes (Horden & Purcell,
2000: 137–140), and the emphasis is on decentralized movement and uncoordinated
actions by individual travellers and traders. Great importance is attached to horizontal
and flexible relationships, providing freedom of movement of goods, people and
ideas. Mariners practicing cabotage epitomize this freedom of movement. Following
Braudel, Horden and Purcell call caboteurs the “proletarians of the sea” (Horden &
Purcell, 2000: 140, 144). This is a rather deceptive qualification: although caboteurs
may have been involved in casual, informal trading and doing the “dirty work” of
sailing up and down the coasts to distribute goods, purchasing and maintaining a
seagoing vessel (even if it was small and used only for coastal shipping) required
considerable investments, while selling, buying and exchanging goods en route or
paying taxes in ports meant that a tramping captain had to possess certain finan-
cial means.2 Horden and Purcell may be right that the role of the invisible caboteur
has been systematically underestimated, but the fact that caboteurs are historically
and archaeologically invisible also makes it hard to assess their share in seaborne
interrelationships, and by implication makes it difficult to assess the intensity of
Mediterranean interconnectivity itself. What is more, the qualifications that Horden
and Purcell attribute to caboteurs are not those typical of proletarians: their supposed
flexibility and ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and especially their role in
bringing together supply and demand, make them look rather like modern brokers
and traders. One cannot help but detect certain modernist, neoliberal overtones in the

2 This point is illustrated by the examples of ships that, according to Horden and Purcell (2000: 142,

149), retained “close links with cabotage”, namely the medieval Serçe Liman wreck which carried
a valuable glass cargo, and the mid-fifth-century BCE Greek and Phoenician ships mentioned in
the Elephantine palimpsest as paying substantial taxes in an Egyptian port.
190 J. P. Crielaard

way ancient and medieval caboteurs are supposed to have contributed to a connected
Mediterranean world as autonomous agents. As champions of free enterprise and
free economic exchange, these pre-modern entrepreneurs bridge the gap between
Antiquity, the Middle Ages and our own modern world.
It is not my intention to try to revitalize the substantivist–formalist debate, but
in my view current archaeological and historical approaches towards ancient inter-
connectivity could benefit from a bit of substantivism. I wish to make two closely
related and partly overlapping points. First, most recent studies on the history of
Mediterranean interconnectivity take a longue durée perspective—something they
share with other historical studies of connecting sea basins or global connectedness.
Also in this respect the points of orientation are Braudel and Horden and Purcell.
One of the main aims of Horden and Purcell’s study is to bring to the fore “certain
continuities … across the extremes of time” (Horden & Purcell, 2000: 5). In this
view, the Mediterranean is interconnected in terms not only of space but also of time.
This has certain methodological consequences, as it allows a great deal of freedom to
assemble from very different periods evidence that is normally used in a chronolog-
ically more restricted fashion. There is also the hazard of re-creating the stereotyped
image of a timeless Mediterranean, for which Horden and Purcell have been rightly
criticized. In other recent studies we see a stricter diachronic perspective, but what
both approaches have in common is that connectivity and mobility are presented as
the master narrative explaining the history and culture of the region. We find this in
a more extreme way in Nayan Chanda’s Bound Together, in which connectivity and
mobility are identified as the story line of Homo sapiens over the last 60,000 years
(Chanda, 2007). For Purcell, mobility is part of the human condition; as he stated in
one of his earlier articles, “there is no real reason to assume that in human history the
settled cultivator is the norm” (Purcell, 1990: 41). It may be questioned, however,
whether integration and connectedness constitute a permanent state of being. It is not
difficult to find periods of progressive or regressive tendencies in connectedness, and
periods of expansion and contraction of Mediterranean culture and Mediterranean
unity.3 Such tendencies become visible especially in times of transition, such as
the periods of the “rise and fall” of the Bronze Age palace societies. But there are
also known cases of regions that chose not to connect, or maintained an ambivalent
stance towards connecting with the Mediterranean. To give one example, during the
second millennium BCE Egyptians imported goods from a number of coastal areas
and islands in the Mediterranean basin, and possessed a fair amount of knowledge
of some Mediterranean people and their lands and cultures. And although Egyptian
ships sailed the Nile and the Red Sea, it seems that mostly Western Asian navigators
and sailors were responsible for maintaining Egypt’s intensive exchange network
with the Mediterranean, which was sometimes referred to as “the great sea of Syria”,
indicating that it was regarded as an integral part of the Syrian rather than Egyptian

3 Horden and Purcell (2000: 172) oppose this view, making a case for continuous interconnectivity
during the early Medieval period and suggesting that thanks to the long-lasting tradition of cabotage
something similar could be assumed for every period that counts as a dark age or period of low
interconnectivity in Mediterranean history.
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 191

sphere. This lack of engagement with the Mediterranean for travelling, trading and
fishing seems to have been the result of a long-lasting cultural practice (von Rüden,
2015, 37–42). Summing up, in studies of the longue durée of Mediterranean connec-
tivity, fluctuations in connectivity and integration over time receive due attention,
but what remains largely underexposed is the regional differentiality in connectivity
within specific periods of connectedness. The inclusion of areas where disconnect-
edness prevailed or of different regional trajectories of connecting or disconnecting
not only provides relief to the phenomenon of interconnectivity, but also helps us to
prevent writing a master narrative in which “successfulness” becomes the leitmotif.
Secondly, with the depolarization of the substantivist–formalist debate, moderate
substantivists in particular acknowledge that the ancient economy was more complex
than Finley portrayed it. There was not one economic system in antiquity, but rather a
plurality of micro-economies. In some periods and regions of the ancient world self-
sufficiency prevailed, while in others something close to a market economy existed.
In other words, the idea was embraced that the ancient economy was characterized
by a situation of heterogeneous pluralism. Reckoning with heterogeneity and differ-
entiality means that we also have to reckon with the possibility that not all groups
within a society were connected in the same way. Taking into account the pluralism
of the ancient economy, Paul Cartledge suggested that “perhaps one might approach
them first by asking whose ‘economy’ or ‘economies’?” (Cartledge, 2002: 13—orig-
inal emphasis). In a similar vein, as students of ancient networks we may approach
Mediterranean connectivity first by asking whose networks or whose connectedness
are we studying?
This brings me to a next point: connectivity and politics. For substantivists, poli-
tics were the key to understanding the ancient economy (see e.g. Hasebroek, 1928).
For Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, the study of the ancient economy’s embedded-
ness in politics, social relationships and external value systems was also a vehicle
to critique the modern, disembedded economy (Morris, 1994). Politics do not play a
very prominent role in the “New Mediterraneanism”—or at least not in a very visible
way. For instance, Irad Malkin’s “Small Greek World”, is a world of expanding
networks, without real centres and thus without power relationships (Malkin, 2011).
There is a risk here of idealization, making the ancient world a good place where
everybody was happily connected—somewhat reminiscent of the hopes and ideals
prevailing in the early days of our own network and information society, when the
so-called Utopians stressed the benefits of new information technologies leading
to decentralization, democratization and freedom of choice.4 The issue of politics
and power structures was brought into the discussion by Ian Morris, who in the
earlier cited article draws parallels with today’s globalization. He points out that the
emphasis that the connectedness model puts on fluidity, interconnection and open-
ness betrays an input of ideas from our own, globalizing world. Drawing parallels

4 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg not only wrote a document entitled “Connectivity is a Human Right”,

but noted on more than one occasion (e.g. in Facebook’s mission statement) that the social network
wasn’t originally designed to be a company, “It was built to accomplish a social mission” and “give
people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.
192 J. P. Crielaard

with the modern globalization debate, he stresses that Mediterranean connectedness

should be likewise approached not as a state but as a process. In analogy with the
term “globalization”, he suggests that “Mediterraneanization” describes this dynamic
process better than the somewhat static “Mediterraneanism”. Morris wishes to draw
the globalization analogy even further: it provides a certain relevance to the study of
the ancient Mediterranean for our own world, but it also induces us to ask questions
similar to those that matter for our own world, for instance regarding both the posi-
tive and the negative effects of connectedness. Referring to Manuel Castells’ classic
trilogy The information age: economy, society and culture (1996, 1997, 1998), he
argues that, just like globalization today, increasing connectedness in the ancient
Mediterranean created winners and losers (Morris, 2003: 33, 40–44; see also Knapp,
2007: 38 on the relation between connectivity and power relations). But we may
even go one step further. It needs no arguing that just because people or groups share
a network, whether ancient or modern, it does not mean that they share the same
interests. Different parties may wish to shape the infrastructure according to their
own needs and, possibly conflicting, interests. Recent experiences with the manip-
ulation of data and the monopolization of information networks may induce us to
investigate whether also in antiquity connectedness and networks were subject to
political manipulation to create or reinforce power relations. In this connection we
may also draw inspiration from so-called mobility studies that have developed since
the mid-2000s. One of the foci of interest is the entanglement of mobility with the
production of hierarchies or, to put it more precisely, the role of power in the produc-
tion of mobilities and the role of mobilities in the constitution of power (Creswell,
2010: 553; 2012: 650–651).

Happily Connected? A Case Study

In the last part of my contribution, I will illustrate some of these points, including
the one on the political manipulation of networks and the link between connect-
edness and power relations. I will do this with the help of outcomes of a research
project that I am conducting together with a group of PhD researchers (see n. 1).
Taking the southern part of the island of Euboia in central Greece as a case study,
the project’s main aim is to give the Mediterranean interconnectivity model a firmer
empirical basis and to critically examine some of its basic tenets. It departs from the
observation that the connectedness model has led to a broadening of the scale of anal-
ysis, namely to supra-regional, Mediterranean perspectives with a strong emphasis
on seaborne communications and mobility. In our project we want to also include
developments in terrestrial communication systems and reintroduce into the discus-
sion the local or regional connections, and analyse how these functioned in relation
to wider Mediterranean interconnections. We have compiled a large database of
legacy data, mainly from salvage excavations and surveys previously carried out in
this region, supplemented with both new information that we have generated in the
course of our project through a variety of remote sensing techniques, and data from
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 193

our own targeted surveys. These pedestrian and drone surveys are carried out in
particular areas and with specific research problems in mind, focusing especially on
ancient road systems, harbour facilities and infrastructure related to the exploitation
of natural resources (see e.g. Kooi et al., 2020). Spatial analyses are performed in
a GIS environment using historical aerial photographs, aerial photographs taken at
different altitudes, high-resolution satellite imagery, digital elevation maps, historic
cartographic information and modern topographic maps. Another important source
of information is our excavations at Karystos-Plakari investigating part of a Final
Neolithic settlement and a sanctuary covering the eleventh to late fourteenth century
BCE, as well as various aspects of the physical environment surrounding the site of
Plakari (Crielaard, 2017; Crielaard & Songu, 2017 with references to preliminary
reports; Crielaard et al., 2017).
Southern Euboia (or Karystia, as it was called in Antiquity) is an interesting region
for the study of maritime and terrestrial interconnections and communications. This
is, first of all, due to its geographical position (Fig. 10.1). The southern part of the
island lies at a juncture of major maritime routes between the Cyclades and the
Euboian Gulf region and is thus closely linked to both the Greek mainland and the
Aegean archipelago and regions further away, such as coastal Anatolia (Crielaard,
2006; Papageorgiou, 2008: 10). Second, southern Euboia encompasses a variety of
landscapes (coastal and alluvial plains, marshes and wetlands, well-watered foothills,
and arid low and high mountain ranges in the hinterland) that are suitable for a range of
sustenance activities, including fishing, agriculture, horticulture, stock breeding and
transhumance. Moreover, it contains iron and marble deposits that were extensively
exploited in Antiquity. The study area is confined on three sides by the sea, and on one
by inhospitable mountain ranges, which means that in principle both seaborne and
land-based communication was important. A third factor is the state of preservation of
the region’s archaeological record. The landscape has remained relatively untouched,
although it has recently come under threat from the construction of summer houses
and especially wind farms. After Antiquity, large parts were used only extensively,
as surface surveys indicate (Keller, 1985: 230–235; Wickens et al., 2018: 32–34,
72–76; Kooi et al., 27) and, compared to other regions in Greece, modern tourism
and land development have so far had limited effects on the landscape. As a result,
archaeological sites and features, including ancient land routes, are well preserved.
A large quantity and variety of find places dating from ca. 4000 BCE to the present
day have been identified, thanks to excavations and, especially, regional surface
surveys carried out over the last 40 years (see Crielaard et al., 2011–12: 88–93 for an
overview of and references to the archaeological research carried out in the region;
add Chidiroglou, 2012; Wickens et al., 2018).
This brief overview will highlight some aspects of the region’s connectivity history
during the second and especially the first millennium BCE. We start our overview in
the Middle Bronze Age. The only inhabited site during this period is located on the
hilltop site of Ayios Nikolaos Mylon, one of the foothills of Mount Ochi. It occupies
a natural defensive position on top of a rocky ridge (ca. 250 masl) overlooking
the Bay of Karystos. Although unexcavated, finds picked up during surveys clearly
indicate that this was an important regional site. Within a possible defensive wall,
194 J. P. Crielaard

Fig. 10.1 Map of southern Euboia (Jaap Fokkema/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

the remains of a number of buildings can be identified. Finds include pottery (local,
central Euboian, Mainland and Cycladic wares), stone tools, some bronze objects,
slag and a fragment of a bronze (copper?) ingot, suggesting that the site was used for
storage and metalworking, among other things. Ayios Nikolaos Mylon continues to be
occupied only during the first part of the Mycenaean period (Keller, 1985: 128–129,
276–278; Tankosić & Mathioudaki, 2011: 123–124, 127, 135 for the four LBA sherds
from the site, broadly datable to late LH IIA to LH IIIA). On the whole, Karystia
seems to be deserted during most of the palatial and post-palatial eras.5 It follows
patterns that in one way or another can also be observed in the Cyclades and elsewhere

5 Theban Linear B documents mention a place called ka-ru-to, which has been identified with
Karystos. However, given the extreme paucity of Mycenaean finds (and especially LH IIIB material),
I suggest that this place must be located outside what was later known as Karystia (see Crielaard &
Songu, 2017: 276–277; Crielaard, forthcoming, both with further refs.).
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 195

in Euboia. Jason Earle argues that the historically sudden disappearance of aspects
of the material culture associated with the ideology and practices of palatial societies
and the meaningful absence of imports from the Near East, indicate that during the
Mycenaen palatial period the Mainland palaces excluded the Cyclades from the long-
distance networks and the valuable resources circulating in these networks (Earle,
2012). Margaretha Kramer-Hajos, who studied the archaeology and socio-political
situation in the Euboian Gulf region, concludes that the local elites of the region that
had been up to date until the early Mycenaean period, seem to have lost all contact
with the elite cultural norms during the LH IIIA2–IIIB period. The diminution of
local power structures and the decline of sites in this period can be linked to a more
general marginalization of the region, probably due to a reorientation of seaborne
and land-based networks brought about by the palace of Thebes (Kramer-Hajos,
2017). We may say that the effects of this marginalization were even more dramatic
for southern Euboia, which seems to have become deserted and probably remained
uninhabited through much of the Late Bronze Age.
After a period of some three or four centuries with no traces of habitation, the
earliest signs of the region’s reoccupation come from the site of Plakari, which is
located some 4 km west of the modern town of Karystos. Our excavations of a
sanctuary on Plakari’s hill top suggest that this cult place dates back to the late
eleventh century BCE.6 We may assume that this catered for a community that had
settled lower down the hill. This must have been a pioneering community that had
to set up a new infrastructure in the wilderness, so to speak, and almost immediately
installed a cult place on the hill’s summit—two activities that must have contributed
significantly to community building and the creation of group identity. A finger
ring and earring of gold, both chance finds dating to the early ninth century and
with good parallels at Lefkandi, suggest that valuable items found their way to
Plakari possibly from the central part of the island and certainly during a period
when both gold and contacts were rare. After this kick start, the community was
moderate in its outward orientation. Pottery and small finds indicate that it maintained
contacts with Attica and central Euboia, but they are nothing of the kind that we find
in contemporary Early Iron Age Lefkandi and Geometric Eretria. I have argued
elsewhere that long-distance exchanges and colonization initiated by these central
Euboian communities were closely connected to status competition; connectedness
acted as a form of “symbolic capital”, while imported valuables testified to the range
of an individual’s or family’s network (Crielaard, 1996, in press). At Plakari we
have only a small number of bronzes from Sicily and Macedonia that date to the
seventh century (Crielaard, forthcoming, fig. 8), suggesting that southern Euboia
was not much involved in the networks that in this period connected the Aegean to
the eastern and central Mediterranean. Surveys show that during the Early Iron Age
and Archaic period, habitation in southern Euboia was stable but barely expanding.

6 The earliest metal finds are six symmetrical arched fibulae with twisted bow, three violin bow
fibulae and three dress pins of bronze dating to the Sub-Mycenaean period (Crielaard, forth-
coming, Fig. 10.3) The earliest identifiable pottery at the site is Early to Middle Protogeometric
(see Charalambidou, 2017, 255–256).
196 J. P. Crielaard

When a large investment was made in overland communications, it happened within

the religious and agricultural sphere in the form of the construction, probably during
the late Archaic and Classical periods, of a road system connecting Plakari with
a rural sanctuary on the fringes of a terraced agricultural area forming its main
catchment area (Kooi et al., 2020). The picture that arises is that Plakari was an
agrarian community focused on self-sufficiency rather than networking. In the later
Archaic period, things started to change. Karystos began minting its own coins and
sported an Olympian champion. Possibly in the sixth century it established an oikos
or treasury in Apollo’s sanctuary on the island of Delos, which was the hub in a cultic
network encompassing much of the Archaic Aegean. This, however, did not last long,
because as Christy Constatakopoulou in her Dance of the islands discusses, Athens
took control over the common religious cults and festivals that united the participant
states. These then became allies and, later, subjects, especially after Athens moved the
treasury of the “Delian League” to the Acropolis (Constatakopoulou, 2007: 39–75).
But Karystos was going to suffer more at the hands of the Athenians. In 490
BCE, the polis had been besieged and its land ravaged by the Persians (Herodotus
6.99.2), but in the following decades it was again devastated, this time by the Greek
anti-Persian coalition (480 BCE; Herodotus 8.112, 121.1) and by the Athenians (c.
476–469 BCE; Herodotus 9.105; Thucydides 1.98). This happened on the pretext
that Karystos had been medizing, but the true reason was probably that for Athens’
expansive policy an important polis at its front door was something it did not want to
tolerate. The dearth of fifth century material found in the surveys and in the Plakari
sanctuary suggests that this series of events seriously affected life in Karystia. It is
probably no coincidence that we see an explosion of find places in the later 5th to
early Hellenistic period, when Karystos first established good relations with Athens
and later profited from the demise of Athens’ regional hegemony. The surveys that we
carried for our project show that the port town of Geraistos at today’s Kastri on the east
coast of southern Euboia (Fig. 10.2) started to flourish as a port of call on interregional
shipping lanes. Its habitation consisted of domestic structures, farmhouses, potters’
workshops producing transport amphorae, a number of iron production sites, and
places for the storage and processing of agricultural products—probably olive oil
and grain, and certainly honey. Harbour facilities were constructed and once again
large-scale investments were made in the construction of a road network, but this time
to connect the immediate hinterland and its production sites to the port of Geraistos.
To complete this brief overview of southern Euboia’s connectivity history, I should
like to point to a part of our study region that is of particular interest because of
the longue durée of its state of “unconnectedness”. To the northeast of ancient and
modern Karystos lies a mountainous zone with Mt Ochi as the highest peak (ca. 1400
masl; see Fig. 10.1). High ridges, alternated with deep valleys and gorges, radiate
from the Ochi massif towards the northern and eastern coasts. It is a monumental
landscape that in almost every respect is larger than the human scale. The valleys
are well watered, and terrace farming is possible on the steep slopes. The coasts
generally consist of steep cliffs with only a small number of inlets, exposed to strong
winds and currents. Kastri/Geraistos is the only protected deep-sea harbour on the
southeast side of the island. The extreme north-eastern part is formed by the notorious
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 197

Fig. 10.2 Aerial photo of Kastri /ancient Geraistos (photo by Anke Stoker/SESLR-project)

Cape Kaphireus, which in ancient times was also called Xilophagos (“Timber eater”)
and in the Frankish and Venetian period Cavo d’Oro (“Gold cape”), because of the
many shipwrecks that occurred here. The “Hollows of Euboia”, where in 480 BCE
the Persian fleet suffered heavy losses (Herodotus 8.13), are found here. According
to the Mediterranean Pilot (IV, 1968, 210, 245) this part of the coast “consists
principally of high precipitous rocks without shelter even for the smallest craft, nor
scarcely a place where a boat can land” (Fig. 10.3). These characteristics of the
land- and seascape make it a very inhospitable and difficult terrain to access by sea
and to traverse over land. I give three examples from different periods that serve
to show that isolation, alienation and marginalization characterize this region and
its long-term history. In the Graeco-Roman world, it had earned a reputation as the
archetypical place where people lived in isolation. For instance, the celebrated orator
Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40–115 CE) in his Seventh or Euboean Discourse chose the
area as the location where the I-figure shipwrecked and is taken care of by simple but
honest people—hunters and herdsmen who live in the wilds of Euboia and almost
never go to town (Lehmann et al., 2012). Our second example comes from the second
half of the thirteenth century CE and relates to the story of Licario (or Ikarios, as
Byzantine historians call him), a knight of humble origins from Karystos, son of a
Venetian father and a local, Karystian mother. After he came into conflict with the
Lombard triarchs in Negroponte (Chalkis), he fled to his home in the southern part
of the island, where he took to a stronghold in the mountains, named Anemopylai
(“Gates of the Wind”), which he fortified. The exact location of the place is disputed
(see Kalamara, 2017: 545–546), but it must have been in the Cavo d’Oro area. Having
198 J. P. Crielaard

Fig. 10.3 Photo of coastal area near Cape Kaphireus (photo by Ruben Brugge/SESLR-project)

assembled some of the discontented elements in the island, he used this as an isolated
but safe base for guerrilla-type raids and brigandage, first plundering the lands of
his Lombard opponents and later conquering the entire island in the service of the
Byzantine emperor as grand admiral (Setton, 1976: 425–428; Chapman, 1993: 112–
113; Fine, 1994: 190). In the post-Medieval and modern period, finally, the area was
inhabited by dispersed Greek- and Albanian-speaking communities. Because of the
rugged terrain, some of the communities have developed a whistling language, sfyria,
to communicate with each other. These places became connected to the modern world
only after the mid-1980s when first electricity and somewhat later asphalt roads were
introduced to the area. The area lies next to a busy shipping lane between the north-
eastern Aegean and northwest Anatolia and the southern part of Greece, but the only
link the local inhabitants had with these maritime networks was through scavenging
the shores for lost cargo and driftwood from shipwrecked ships.

Concluding Remarks

The interconnectivity paradigm has led to a fundamentally different way of looking

at Mediterranean, interregional interactions and Mediterranean history. In this paper
I wanted to draw attention, however, to two aspects that tend to remain underex-
posed: regional differentiality in connectivity (including the possibility of certain
areas experiencing prolonged periods of unconnectedness) and the socio-political
manipulation of connectedness and networks to create or reinforce power relations.
10 Happily Connected? The Interconnectivity Paradigm … 199

The long-term history of southern Euboia shows that there were periods when this
part of the Aegean was cut off from Mediterranean networks, and we may be certain
that more cases like these can be found in any given period in the Mediterranean.
We have also seen that there are areas or sub-regions that for various reasons tend
towards “unconnectednesses”, even during a substantial part of their history. This
invites us to step a little back from a maximalist position in our views on Mediter-
ranean connectivity and in the debate on the ancient economy. If we accept that risk
management is an important feature of the Mediterranean agricultural economy (cf.
Horden & Purcell, 2000: 175–230), we may say that connectivity was not always
and everywhere a reliable or feasible strategy to deal with risks and uncertainty. In
other words, self-sufficiency was not only an ideal to achieve, as Horden and Purcell
believe, but also—under some conditions—a reliable means for survival.
Proponents of a connected Mediterranean attribute much importance to agency. In
an article on insularity and island identity, Bernard Knapp acknowledges that insular
resources and environments can be very real attributes of island life, but argues that
insularity is also a social situation in the sense that it depends on what people make
of it and take the sea as either a connector or separator (Knapp, 2007: 50). Horden
and Purcell go one step further and claim that the geography of the Mediterranean
incites its inhabitants to continually interact, attributing a considerable amount of
agency to caboteurs. I have argued that there are good grounds to question ideas
about free enterprise and the freedom of movement of goods, people and ideas (or
the idea that isolation or connectnednes was a matter of choice) that underlie the
notion of intense interactions between different Mediterranean micro-regions and of
high Mediterranean interconnectivity and integration through the ages. Ship-building
technology, the use of sea-going vessels, knowledge of the sea and navigation, and
access to the circulation of goods are just a few factors that determined the measure
of agency that people had. In addition to this, networks were not necessarily free
and neutral means of interaction, but—as we just observed—were also subject to
manipulation and power relations.
All this induces us to create more diverse, regional histories that take into account
regional and temporal differentiality in connectnedness and integration, and the
repercussions this had on local and regional economies. Archaeology and survey
archaeology in particular have much to offer to such a regional approach.

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Chapter 11
Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth
to First Centuries BCE): Exploring Social
Tension in a Path Dependency Model

Mark L. Lawall

Abstract Two aspects of the production of transport amphoras (shipping containers

often for wine and oil) are considered in terms of path dependency and tensions within
Greek society. Amphora shapes often align with broad geographic regions, but at
times the shapes are more narrowly associated with a single polis. The geography of
production is examined here in terms of the socially constructed pathways shaping
amphora production. The practice of impressing names and images on amphoras
before firing is often interpreted as a mechanism of civic fiscal management. Poleis
often depended on their wealthier citizens for the management of complex and some-
times risky enterprises. Stability in the industry was thus achieved and yet changes
to even the most complex stamping systems reveal potential tensions in the system.

Introductory Matters

This paper, like many in this volume, works to explain rather than simply describe an
archaeologically observed phenomenon. Across the Mediterranean world in Classical
Antiquity, many goods, but especially wine and olive oil, were packaged, shipped,
and stored in two-handled clay jars, amphoras. This paper examines two facts about
these amphoras: their differences in shape and their use of images, often on one or
both handles, impressed into the clay before firing. As was the case in the version
of this paper delivered at the conference in Vienna, the effort centers on a concept
borrowed from Douglass North and elaborated upon within the broader field of New
Institutional Economics (NIE): Path Dependency (North, 1990, esp. Chapter 11).
Practices in a society will create “paths” of behavior which in turn constrain or
encourage change. In something of a caricatured view, path dependency might start
from a simple observable fact—the arrangement of keys on a typewriter or the width
of a typical axle on a cart—as a seemingly simple prime mover, and then spin
through the unforeseen, long-term impacts of that fact. The present, revised version

M. L. Lawall (B)
Classics Department, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
e-mail: mark.lawall@umanitoba.ca

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 205

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_11
206 M. L. Lawall

of this paper, however, treats those paths themselves as potential loci for cohesion or
conflict. In other words, the social catalysts or impediments to economic change are
themselves the dynamic products of tension or contradiction within society. Such
scrutiny changes the tenor of the investigation. In a traditional approach to NIE,
path dependency often implicitly portrays all participants as willingly, even uncon-
sciously, acting in harmony within a complex social system. The process of seeking
contradictions and potential loci of conflict along these paths forces the researcher
to examine the roles of easily ignored groups within ancient society and to address
issues that are not traditionally raised with respect to amphoras as archaeological
evidence for ancient economies.

Amphoras

Before I introduce the main focus and argument of my paper, I should introduce
briefly the material focus: Aegean transport amphoras. Even within mainstream Clas-
sical Archaeology, the understanding of Aegean amphoras pales compared either with
fine painted pottery or with later Roman amphoras. Greek amphoras, like their later
Roman counterparts, were the primary container for wine, olive oil, and other prod-
ucts in seaborne trade. They could be transported overland albeit at much greater
cost, and they were often used for storage. But their design was clearly aimed to
facilitate stacking on shipboard.
Research on Greek amphoras goes back to the sixteenth century (Badoud, 2015).
From the beginning, particular interest was paid to the stamped impressions found on
their handles. That focus on stamps quickly came to define the field of amphorology
(Garlan, 2000): the study of stamps and, to a lesser extent amphora shapes, in terms
of civic identity, the proper reading of each stamp, and the numbers of stamps of
each type as found at each site.
As more typological research was carried out with more and more attention
to production sites and fabrics, the one-to-one correspondence between city and
amphora shape began to weaken (Lawall, 2011a). The meaning of amphora shapes,
whether as simply a matter of regional style or a deliberate effort at branded marketing
of goods using the shape of the vessel, became a point of debate in its own right. The
same expansion of research made clear how uncommon and how varied amphora
stamping really was. In addition, closer attention to papyrus documents listing goods
carried in amphoras highlighted the fact that these were general purpose containers
(Kruit & Worp, 2000). Shipwrecked cargoes, too, made clear the range of goods that
might be shipped in any one amphora type (Carlson, 2003; Foley et al., 2012).
Indeed, the deeper one delves into Greek amphora studies, the more diffi-
culties seem to arise. We cannot simply count stamps to get a sense of trade
patterns (Empereur, 1982; Lawall, 2005); shapes cannot be equated easily to specific
commodities (Bonifay, 2007; Lawall, 2011b; Panagou, 2016). And yet, that same
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 207

increasingly complex picture also brings the advantage of revealing a much more
diverse set of internal and external social relations mediated to one extent or another
by these artifacts.

Amphoras and Socioeconomic Theory

Studies of Aegean transport amphoras of the late Archaic through Hellenistic periods
rarely admit to a particular theoretical stance. Implicit assumptions of rational action
underpin much of the scholarship: stamps certified capacity since no one would have
trusted such handmade, clay vessels for commerce otherwise (Grace, 1949); shapes
must have served to advertise the product of each unique polis as merchants vied
for consumers (Koehler, 1996: 326); such branded jars helped to market the well-
known wine or oil of the given city. Discussion of trade in earlier periods, particularly
the late 8th- and early seventh-century “world of Homer”, has placed considerable
emphasis on the social embeddedness of the economy, trade, and exchange (Bravo,
1977; Mele, 1979; and with more emphasis on the profits of commerce, van Wees,
2009). Apart from the world of “untrustworthy Phoenicians”, trade was a part-time
business, and luxury goods moved as gifts among aristocrats. And yet, even in the rare
instances where amphoras are mentioned in scholarship on Homeric economies, they
are already associated with merchants, commerce, and advertising (Osborne, 2007:
285). By the late sixth century, once the Greek world was securely populated with
“professional merchants” and widespread use of coinage, the social context of trade
fades from the discussion. The evidence should speak for itself in a familiar language
of economic rationality. From this period forward, amphoras are seen as standardized,
branded, cargo containers serving the commercial needs of the monetized, developed
Mediterranean economy.
Undeniably, there has been some debate over interpretive models. When the
numbers of imported amphoras are too small, some scholars argue against a “trade”
or “market” linking exporter and importer (Finkielsztejn, 2011). Many efforts at
further interpretation may be dismissed as “modernist” (Badoud et al., 2012: 165).
Somewhat ironically, the “straightforward” interpretation of all amphoras as branded
containers of commodities—an explicitly modernist interpretation—stands largely
immune to criticism. Even commentaries within the paradigm of NIE in the world
of ancient economies pay no attention to such matters.
208 M. L. Lawall

Path Dependency

Even so, NIE’s attention to transaction costs does draw attention to archaeologically
accessible variables such as marking practices, standardization, choices of shape,
and so on. Equally important, and often ignored, is North’s emphasis on path depen-
dency in the study of economic development. Existing social, political, and economic
conditions can either prevent or accelerate changes in economic systems.
The concept of path dependency involves what might be considered both social
structure or social behavior as well as economics. In its most basic form, path
dependency predicts that once started and successful, a given practice will tend
to be followed and will tend to shape (often constrain) any further development. In
economic terms, the risks of change from a successful path are too great; the costs
of learning something entirely new are too high. From the perspective of economic
geography, the location of a given business might attract related firms to the same
location in order that they, too, might benefit from established routes of supply,
shared knowledge, available labor, and so on (Fuchs & Shapira, 2005; Lagerholm
& Malmberg, 2009; cf. Martin, 2012). Path dependency, however, need not impinge
solely on what seem to be neatly economic practices. Terpstra’s study (2013) of
Roman commerce highlights the long-established emphasis on written law and the
sunk costs of education that would dissuade actors from deviating from the social
norms of behavior. Path dependency need not always have positive outcomes. Much
of Jared Diamond’s controversial analysis in Collapse depends on established social
norms preventing societies from adapting to changing circumstances (Diamond,
2005; cf. Demenocal et al., 2005).
Cast in this way, path dependency is more than simply noting that the way things
were done earlier strongly predicts how they will be done in the future. That in itself
only defends a static view of economic practice that erases a need for economic
history altogether; obviously, this is not the intended outcome. Instead, a wider
socioeconomic view of path dependency encourages the search for social structures
that affected and shaped economic systems and practices over time. At the same
time, the changing economic systems might in turn reshape the paths themselves.
We should be aware of casting past behavior solely in terms of agents maximizing
profits within the rationality imposed by these path dependencies (cf. Halkos & Kyri-
azis, 2010: 261). Indeed, assumptions underlying the application of path dependence
theory are very much at the forefront of debate in Economic Geography, where the
theory has gained wide traction (e.g., Martin, 2012).
Studies of ancient Greek economies and society have shown relatively little
interest in the concept of path dependency. There are some noteworthy exceptions.
Halkos and Kyriazis (2010: 261) argue that continued Athenian investment in naval
forces locked the Athenian economy onto an outward-looking, economically adven-
turous trajectory. Sparta in contrast, Ober notes (2015: 194), did not have a tradition
of investment in naval power and so did not join the Athenian-led coalition against
Persia in the early fifth century. More recently, Fleck and Hanssen (2018) note that
those ancient Greek tyrannies that emerged from endogenous processes (i.e., those
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 209

based on paths existing within the given polis) were more successful than those
imposed from outside. A recent dissertation on Archaic maritime trade addresses
path dependency in its opening theoretical overview and, in its conclusions, high-
lights the importance of pre-existing institutions (without explicitly invoking path
dependency) (Salay, 2018: 66, 74, 82, 363–364).
Path dependency in these terms is largely descriptive, highlighting possibly
unforeseen connections (e.g., Athens’ naval build-up in the 480s BCE is connected
with its long-term commercial interests stretching through the fourth century BCE).
Path dependency, however, can be used more in line with the dialectical approach
so accessibly described by Randall McGuire in his keynote address to the confer-
ence and in his earlier works (1992). Social structures, practices, organizations, and
institutions contain within themselves the contradictions and tensions that encourage
or prevent change. Paths in this sense are not simply “pre-existing conditions” but
conditions that for some reason actively continue to exist, actively shape other paths,
or actively prevent access to other paths. This paper explores certain aspects of the
history of transport amphora use in the Greek world from this dialectical perspective
on path dependency.

Amphora Shapes in a Social Critique

In turning now to the amphoras themselves, I will focus on the Aegean world of
the late sixth through first centuries BCE. While it would be easy to consider this
period one simply of professional merchants and markets, the situation is much more
complex. This period includes major events in the political and economic history of
the “Greek World”: the arrival of Persian economic demands, then Athenian; the
massive expansion of the Hellenistic world and the scale of its economic activity;
the increasing integration of Roman and Greek economies in the later second and
first centuries BCE. The economies of the Greek world did not remain static. Within
this chronological framework, I will address two topics in particular: (1) amphora
shape and (2) amphora stamps. While scholars agree that these two elements were
important for the use of amphoras in antiquity, there is much debate as to the precise
nature of that importance.

Path Dependency, Economic Geography of Amphora

Production, and Amphora Shapes

An often-repeated concept regarding amphoras in the Greek world is that each jar
indicated its place of origin through both its shape and, often, a stamp on the handle
or neck. In this way, the jar advertised the goods of the region of production much like
modern branded packaging. Implicit in this model is the modern idea that advertising
210 M. L. Lawall

and brand strength are natural and inevitable elements in economic competition.
There are, however, important nuances that are often neglected in this characterization
of Greek amphora production.
First, we should consider how and why shapes are shared among potters before
assuming the goal of brand advertisement. Research on ceramic production from
both ethnographic and archaeological perspectives has placed increasing emphasis
on “communities of practice” and the cultural structure of learning the craft of pottery
(e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wendrich, 2012; Knappett & van der
Leeuw, 2014). In such environments of active and communal production, similar-
ities of form and decorative styles move from person to person and generation to
generation. Clustering of potting workshops and kiln sites, as well-attested archaeo-
logically, fits both the expectations raised by such active, shared learning processes
and, to some extent, certain economic efficiencies. Clustered kiln sites reduce the
footprint of risk from such pyrotechnics and reduce the travel costs for distributing
clay and fuel. At the same time, some degree of spread over a landscape is needed
both to avoid overburdening resources in terms of fuel and clay and to ease access
to agricultural producers (wine, oil, and any other goods that might go into the jars).
There is also a balance to be struck with the infrastructure for moving the filled
amphoras to the ports if they are intended for wider distribution.
A patrilocal marriage system as existed in the Greek world might seem ill-suited
to transferring style from place to place (cf. the movement of female potters through
marriage as seen in much of the ethnographic literature). And yet, the Greek prac-
tice of equal inheritance to all sons, often resulting in the spatial dispersal of their
households (even to the point of encouraging emigration), may have contributed to
widespread communities of practice. Indeed, migrant potters are attested directly, as
in the case of foreign names among Athenian fine ware potters and painters (often
thought to be enslaved peoples) (Papadopoulos, 2009: 235), Athenian potters at
Ephesos (Trinkl, 2013: 196–197) and a Jewish family of potters in Hellenistic Syron
Kome in Egypt (Berliner Griechische Urkunden [Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Kgl.
Museen zu Berlin] VI, 1282).
The potentially wide geographic extent of these communities of practice (here
considered as equivalent to shape traditions in amphoras) is easily demonstrated
through close typological studies of amphoras. Even as early as the 1950s, researchers
recognized that not all jars that looked like those of a well-known producer were
from that one site. Thus, Russian scholars distinguished Thasian amphoras from
those labelled as “circle of Thasos” (Zeest, 1960). Since then, discoveries of kiln
sites and closer studies of amphora fabrics and stamps make clear the long history
of a broad regional style across the north Aegean from the Archaic through early
Hellenistic periods. The same is true of the southeastern Aegean islands and the
adjacent mainland. Smaller-scale regions of shared style may be noted around Lesbos
and Aeolis as well as Chios and the adjacent mainland (Lawall, 2011a, 2017).
Considerations of path dependency related to transmission of knowledge, mobility
of craftsmen, and sunk costs related to location of workshops all go far to explain
the widespread phenomenon of regional styles among Aegean amphora producers.
Even the slightest shifts in this model—particularly in terms of limiting the mobility
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 211

of craftsmen or increasing the benefits that might accrue from proximity to reliable
agricultural and shipping infrastructure—could narrow the spread of a regional style
into a very localized style, limited perhaps to the territory of only one polis.

The Social Cost of Large-Scale Agriculture and Narrowed

Communities of Practice

This explanation of localized style and its coexistence with regional styles of
amphoras is of fundamental importance. Narrowly localized styles might appear
to us, viewing the ancient world through a modern lens, as a case of brand marketing
(e.g., Twede, 2002: 189–193; Rauh et al., 2013: 157–158; cf. Lawall, 2011a: 45). We
know that ancient amphoras could be (but not always were) referred to by a geograph-
ical title (Rhodian, Thasian, etc., see Kruit & Worp, 2000). And, in some cases, the
stamps that appear on the jars make direct reference to the city of origin. But there is
a substantive difference between features given to an artifact through the course of
its production that are intended to serve those roles of economic brands, on the one
hand; and the same features arising from the course of production without any inten-
tions of facilitating trade in the ways recognized through brand-based marketing, on
the other.
Many different variables affect whether we see a wide geographic spread of a
given amphora shape or a narrow concentration of that shape: freedom of movements
of potters, sunk costs of establishing production sites, necessary scale of amphora
production, scale of production of goods to fill the amphoras, proximity to producers
of goods to be packaged, proximity to ports for export, available social/economic
infrastructure for exports, levels of demand for amphora-borne goods. Many of these
variables are intimately related. Those persons with the socioeconomic capital to
create large-scale farms or amalgamate the production of smaller farms might well
have the “international” contacts to facilitate transfers of substantial quantities of
surplus goods in amphoras. As land is converted from small-scale, diversified produc-
tion for local needs to large scale, homogenous production of “cash crops”, other
groups within the local population might be forced or encouraged to expand into crafts
or other activities that serve these elite landowners. Scattered, small-scale amphora
production—sharing shapes over a wide area—would be forced to coalesce into
larger workshops serving larger farms. Emigration of potters might be restricted as
local demand for their wares increases; increasingly complex mechanisms may be
needed to manage new scales of production and distribution of the jars. Quantitative
change leads to qualitative change (McGuire, 1992: 97; Ollman, 2014: 371).
We should be wary of expecting or assuming inevitable stability in this seemingly
“natural” progression in scale and concomitant increase in complexity (on scalar
stress and complexity, see Johnson, 1982). As Paynter observed:
Inequality became an increasingly prominent aspect of complex society [with complexity
emerging as a response to scalar stress], and problems arose from the efforts to maintain
212 M. L. Lawall

it. Neoevolutionary theory, however, never deemed these problems a significant source of
cultural change. (1989: 374)

The internal social tensions are not hard to imagine. Access to land and its potential to
offer autarchic subsistence would be cut off. With arable land and other raw materials
increasingly serving production for exportable surplus under elite control, options
for the livelihoods of others would change. While some new service occupations
might be created, other past practices would no longer be available. Movement over
the landscape would be restricted, and, with that restriction, opportunities for new
social connections and new sources of wealth would become limited. Tensions need
not be limited only to the gap between elites and nonelites. Elite competition for
control of surplus products and for networks of trade or exchange could have been a
further locus of instability. Such competition might occur within or among multiple
communities of elites, and this competition might be manifest in any number of
social, political, and economic fora.
Even so, such limitations both on opportunities and on access to resources for
some and such competition for the fruits of labor and exchange for others do not
appear to have resulted in widespread conflict and social instability. Why not? Can
we even be sure that such an impression of socioeconomic stability is correct? The
next section of this paper addresses this issue of social stability or instability.
A brief summary of the discussion so far: I have treated amphora shapes, shared
over wider or narrower geographic regions, as manifestations of communities of
practice. As certain communities shrank in geographical extent, the uniqueness
of the shape could be interpreted as an advertisement for the commodities of the
resulting narrower region. Such a market-oriented function of amphora shapes may
have resulted from the forces creating narrow correlations between shape and place,
but it would be a mistake to assume this was the goal without considering the potential
social change that led to this point. In the next section, I consider the phenomenon of
amphora stamping, not as a means of commodity advertising or even quality assur-
ance, but as a practice emerging at times out of a web of path dependencies that
may help explain this apparent social stability. From here it will be possible to seek
evidence for tension and conflict underlying what appears to be a complex, but stable,
system.

Amphora Stamps, Complexity, and Social (In)Stability

A textbook view of the interaction between ancient Greek social complexity,

primarily focused on governance, and social stability may be summarized as follows.
With the rise of landed wealth and oligarchic government following the collapse of
the Bronze Age palaces, Greece struggled through a period of tension among elites,
most notably manifest in the rise and fall of “tyrants”, conventionally defined as rulers
operating outside the traditional constitutional structures. Whether through the work
of such tyrants or through the work of “lawgivers” tensions between rich and poor
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 213

were alleviated through legal reforms and redistribution of wealth, in some cases
through emigration to “colonies”. Concepts of isonomia (equality before the law)
and demokratia (rule by the people) emerge as guiding principles in Greek society
and governance, admittedly with a strongly Athenocentric perspective. While such
principles in no way removed the gap between rich and poor, many different steps
were taken to bond the polis community together despite such differences (and again
most of our evidence comes from Athens). Wealth or even popularity was not an
impediment to political office when such positions were assigned simply by lot.
Judicial matters were in the hands of massive citizen juries, and such duty was a
source of (very modest) income. The wealthy were given many opportunities to
contribute visibly to the collective needs of the community. In some cases, foreign
elites were given extensive and very public local honors for similar favors to the polis.
Commentary on social complexity and instability in ancient Greece tends to focus
on the interactions among competing elites and the tension between the interests of
the family and the interests of the state. Particularly once democracy was established
in Athens at the end of the sixth century BCE, interactions between rich and poor,
large and small landowners, are rarely considered.
The use of stamps in the developing complexity of amphora production and trade
can be viewed against this more general social backdrop in two ways. First, the
development of the institutions relevant to amphora stamps can be set easily into the
stability-maintaining paths widely recognized in Classical and Hellenistic poleis.
And yet, second, these same institutions may be viewed as placing the polis in a
middle role (in the sense of managing the production of workers for the owners of
those products, the wealthy landowners) maintaining a social stability for the benefit
of the wealthy. Hints of lingering tensions underlying the institutions related to
amphora stamping may be seen in both the changes to stamping practices themselves,
change within different communities of practice, and even in historical events that
are connected with the amphora trade.

Amphora Stamps and Social Stability

Some general background is needed to understand how amphora stamps might fit
into the broader structure of Classical and Hellenistic Greek society. The practice
of marking amphoras with an image or name impressed in the clay prior to firing
dates back to the earliest production of post-Bronze Age Greek shipping containers.
Only in the decades around 400 BCE, do we start to see complex stamping systems
providing one name, conventionally labelled by modern scholars as the fabricant,
another indicating the annual magistrate or priest, and the ethnic identifier (Balabanov
et al., 2016; Tzochev, 2016; Garlan, 1999). This pattern of amphora stamping then
continued with some variation through the end of the second century BCE.
The purpose of such stamping has dominated amphora-related debate throughout
the life of the field. There are four main camps in the discussion: (1) those who see
in the stamps a reference to some civic process of taxation (Grace, 1934; Garlan,
214 M. L. Lawall

2013; Rauh et al., 2013: 150–151; Badoud, 2019), (2) those who see a guarantee
of capacity or other quality of the jar (Finkielsztejn, 2006, 2012; Grace, 1949), (3)
those who see some sort of reference to private ownership (cf. Garlan, 2013, 2019),
and (4) those who argue for the stamps’ relationship to a system of managing the
commerce in amphoras (Palaczyk, 2016, 2017). Reference to a private system now
has few adherents; the role of certification comes in and out of scholarly favor; some
role in civic taxation is currently the more dominant of the four.
The debate tends to hinge on the inherent characteristics of the stamps themselves
(Garlan, 2000, 2013). Stamps were often as poorly legible in antiquity as they are
now; they cannot have played a consistent or detailed role for distant consumers.
Despite their permanence, stamps were most meaningful at the time and place they
were applied (a buyer at the Pontic site of Olbia, for example, would have no way
of complaining to the persons named on a Thasian or Rhodian amphora stamp even
if the names were legible). Even at the peak of their use in a given city, stamps were
never applied to every jar, so the act of stamping one jar had to matter for other
jars left unstamped. Stamps were applied before firing making measurement and
certification of the jars problematic. In cities that used these fairly complex stamping
systems, the degree of coordination required to design and distribute the annually
changing stamps’ dies renders especially problematic the idea of the private initiative
behind these systems.
A fundamental difficulty is that we do not know the job description of the fabricant.
In rare instances, titles identify the fabricant as keramarch and ergasteriarch (Garlan,
2013; Panagou, 2010). In some, but not all, cases each Thasian workshop assemblage
is dominated by only one or two fabricants, such as Skymnos at Chioni, Lysikles at
Limenaria, or the likely fatherson pair of Aristagoras and Demalkes at Kalonero. And
yet, the Molos workshop, while dominated by Pylades, offers a scatter of other names;
and the Keramidi workshop attests at least six fabricants with substantial numbers of
stamps (Garlan, 2004–2005). A similar situation may be present, later, near Knidos,
where an area roughly 900 by 300 m yielded deposits attesting ten different fabricants
(Empereur et al., 1999). Known pairings of Thasian fabricants and eponyms indicate
that fabricants could maintain their position for multiple years and even decades; the
same is true for Rhodes, Knidos, Sinope and elsewhere (Garlan, 1999; Cankardeş-
Şenol, 2015–2017; Grace, 1985; Garlan, 2004). Later Thasian stamps, after around
332 BCE, replaced the actual name of the fabricant with a system of images, one for
each fabricant, which then changed from year to year (Tzochev, 2016). From such
terminology and patterns of practice, the most common interpretation of fabricant
has been workshop owner or maker’s name (Debidour, 1998), but fabricants have also
been interpreted as owners of estates that used or even owned the nearby workshops,
managers of amphora distribution, or those individuals who may have overseen the
workshops and paid the required taxes from their profits (Badoud, 2019; Garlan,
1998, 2013).
By way of exploring the role or roles of fabricants, I start from a basic point:
Amphora production has many “moving parts”. There were many different elements
that needed to be coordinated and financed, from procurement of raw materials
on a large scale, to potting and drying, to firing and stockpiling in anticipation of
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 215

the vintage or oil pressing or other agricultural processes (Lawall, 2005; Palaczyk,
2016, 2017). In other instances of multi-part enterprises with substantial costs, at
least some Greek poleis turned to their wealthier citizens (and non-citizens in rare
cases) to provide the finances: the construction, upkeep, and manning of a trireme
(Gabrielsen, 1994; Jordan, 2001), a dramatic production (Wilson, 2000), cultivation
of sacred land, or the operation of a mine (Crosby, 1950; Lalonde et al., 1991; Shipton,
2000). In some cases, such liturgical services brought little more than renown and
thanks in return. In other cases, the harder the laborers worked and the less was spent
on supporting their labor, the greater the profit for the lessee. And whether in the
case of sacred land or mines, leases could continue for decades.
Amphora stamps may have been part of some sort of accounting mechanism in
this process of coordinating production and initial distribution of the jars. Given the
inconsistencies of their application and given at least some ancient Greek penchant
for memorializing such elite support for their cities, the stamps may have served
no greater purpose than to offer the occasional reminder of who was insuring the
smooth operation of the city’s shipping container supply. Stamps would also offer
a permanent record that a person did fulfill their duty; that degree of accounting as
provided by the stamps at the very least can be assumed. We need not expect each
jar to be certified as “tax paid” in the sense that modern liquor bottles must display
a tax sticker. But enough jars were marked to make clear that the duties of the fabri-
cant—whether tax collection somehow related to the amphoras or broader matters of
amphora management—had been fulfilled. Then as now, the stamps offered proxy
evidence that a complex system existed.
A further feature of these “fabricants” is that their civic status seems to have varied
from place to place and over time. While some fabricant names (e.g., those of the
stamps of Chios) correlate closely with names on inscriptions and hence presumably
higher status citizens; in other cases, the names of women or foreigners appear as
fabricants (García Sánchez, 2008; Badoud, 2019; Badoud & Dana, 2019).
In this sense, fabricant stamping uses the established path of enlisting and then
commemorating (presumably wealthy) individuals to manage a new organizational
challenge. Earlier stamping practices of the sixth and fifth centuries need not be
manifestations of this same path nor can we assume they addressed the same problem.
Among earlier stamps, abbreviations for ethnic labels and civic-themed images are
fairly common (though not exclusively), but there are also isolated letters without a
clear point of reference (Lawall, Forthcoming). Particularly in the case of references
to the polis in these earlier stamps, we may be seeing the start of “the state” taking on
some sort of managerial role (Garlan, 2013); even enigmatic letter stamps or other
markings may indicate the same thing, but any certainty in this regard is elusive. In
turning next to examining potential social tensions inherent to the socioeconomic
systems attested by the amphora stamps, it is sufficient to take the ca. 400 BCE
emergence of fabricant stamping as our starting point.
216 M. L. Lawall

Amphora Stamps and Instability

Up to this point, I have characterized the need for management of the amphora
production and distribution system as a matter of an organizational challenge needing
a response. The civic response of arranging for or recognizing some commemorated
role for fabricants may appear as simply a benign, even benevolent resolution to an
otherwise crisis-laden situation of “scalar stress”. The state, looked at in this way, is
providing an organizational layer to alleviate conflicts and confusion that might arise
simply from the increased scale of production and export of amphora-borne goods.
The roots of such conflicts, however, might not be limited to the numbers of jars to
be filled, the number of potters having to share one kiln site, or the number of ships
needed to export the season’s production.
Potential loci of conflict become clearer when one considers the admittedly vague
term fabricant in the framework of the dialectic. A person cannot be a fabricant
without that role (whatever it may be in specific terms) being assigned by or at
least recognized by the city to serve, somehow, in the administration of amphora
use benefitting the elite landowners. At the same time, the existence of the fabricant
presupposes those being managed in some way by that position—to some extent the
potters creating the amphoras and agricultural workers producing the goods to fill
them. In this sense, the civic apparatus personified by the fabricant exists as something
of a Marxist “middle class” (McGuire, 1993: 103). If the “normal” material trace
of this three-way definition is the amphora stamp with the name of the fabricant,
the eponym, and the ethnic (name or image), then changes or deviations from this
normal approach might hint at social tensions that are worth further exploration.
Changes to such systems are relatively common but tend to be viewed as matters
for classification rather than social history. Thus, over the third quarter of the fourth
century BCE, Thasian amphora stamps downplayed the importance of the fabricant
by replacing the names with annually changing symbols. The change did not occur
at one specific point, and recent work has highlighted the problems of thinking
about Thasian amphora stamps as “old style” (with fabricant names) and “new style”
(fabricant symbols) (Tzochev, 2016). And yet, selection and coordination of this new
system are recognized as putting a greater burden on the polis itself. For whatever
reason, this added effort was deemed more appealing than naming fabricants. The
ethnic remained. Kudos to the city; the fabricant disappeared into anonymity.
The Pontic city of Chersonesos, initially provided the fabricant’s name as only
a small monogram or name in small letters, but eventually that is dropped and the
magistrate’s (astynomos) name stands alone (Kac, 1994). The name of the city never
appeared. Another Pontic center, Sinope, gave prominent place to both the astynomos
and the fabricant name, even providing patronymics in some cases to clarify identity
with greater precision. Here, too, the ethnic is never spelled out but is sometimes
indicated by an image echoing Sinopean coin types (Garlan, 2004).
For much of the Hellenistic period, especially the later third and second centuries
BCE, Rhodes and Knidos provided the names of fabricants, magistrates/priests, and
some indication of ethnic identity on their amphora stamps with great consistency. By
11 Aegean Transport Amphoras (Sixth to First Centuries BCE) … 217

the mid first century BCE, however, both cities shifted to a very rudimentary stamping
system of an image (sometimes of ethnic significance, but in the case Knidos just a
palm branch) or monogram (for Rhodes, Finkielsztejn, 2000; for Knidos, Jefremow,
1995).
Such changes in stamping behavior could be viewed as simple administrative
changes that were not indicative of deeper social difficulty. On the other hand, if
a city such as Thasos considered it necessary to commemorate fabricants in their
roles for the first two generations of amphora stamping, then a deliberate removal of
those names—particularly to replace the names with a system requiring even more
oversight—is difficult to see as simply neutral. At the same time, we need not assume
(as scholars have argued in the past) that such a change could only come about through
the arrival of some external political force (Macedon in the case of Thasos, see Grace,
1949: 182). Unfortunately, it is difficult to propose specific explanations underlying
the changes apparent in the stamping systems. The value in thinking about fabricant
stamps as part of a three-way relationship (elite landowners—fabricant—workers)
is that changes in “the material culture” of fabricant now become warning signs
encouraging us to explore both the civic or political history surrounding the period
of change and the evidence for labor and production at the same time. The context of
civic history is often more readily available than that of labor history, but increased
attention to the archaeology of rural industry (especially amphora production, oil
and wine production) and farm sites should prove useful once we know when and
where to be seeking data.

Conclusion

This paper has attempted to meld together two different, yet not entirely distinct,
models for interpreting economic change. Path dependency in its simplest form
predicts that pre-existing practices will impede or otherwise shape any future change.
Much of the work in this area treats economic systems as built on standard assump-
tions of efficiency and maximization, and as systems working (or not working) as
harmonious, homogenous entities. A key element of Marxist theory is the importance
of context; here, too, pre-existing elements in a system shape its future. The models
differ in their assumptions about the harmony and homogeneity of society, but the
process of bringing them together has highlighted important features and potential
research questions.
I began by characterizing amphora production in terms of communities of prac-
tice. This view of craft production should, inherently, encourage the reproduction
of traditions and pursuit of established paths. By considering opposing forces such
as free movement versus geographically restricted labor, or self-sufficiency versus
surplus production, observable changes in the geography of amphora production
become more complex, perhaps more sinister in a way, than simply a deviation from
pre-existing practice. Changing scale of production and export of amphora-borne
goods seems to be significantly correlated with such changes in the geography of
218 M. L. Lawall

amphora shapes. In this sense, a deviation from a path draws attention to tensions
rather than harmonies within society. Ancient Greek society is often portrayed as
striving toward equality under the law (for citizens) and an ideology of cohesion and
unity. While the existence of wealth in the hands of the elite was never denied, it was
harnessed for the public good. On the one hand, the emergence of amphora stamping
systems naming “fabricants” might be interpreted, benignly, as evidence for a polis
following the established path of harnessing elite resources for the management of a
complex industry. Alternatively, the appearance, modification, and even disappear-
ance of “fabricant stamping” may be related to tensions among a triad of groups:
the workers producing and filling the amphoras; the civic government potentially
benefitting from the operation of the amphora trade; and the elite profiting from
participation in the amphora trade.
Much of the scholarship related to amphora shapes and stamps has been descriptive
in nature, or at best attempting to assign the purpose of amphora stamping to a
particular function in ancient Greek society. The other papers in this volume establish
a context that should challenge archaeologists of Classical and Hellenistic Greek
economies to seek ways of illuminating ancient internal relations beyond the polis
ideology of harmony and equality that ancient and many modern sources offer us.

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Chapter 12
Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery
in the Archaic and Classical Period

Robin Osborne

Abstract This paper explores the nature of the distribution of Greek painted pottery
and argues on the basis of the distinctive features of this distribution that various
possible types of trade and exchange can be ruled out. In particular, it establishes the
importance of the middleman’s knowledge of the market to the distribution pattern,
but argues that if we are to understand change over time then we have to allow that the
painters of the pots were in the end responsible for the nature and range of imagery
available for sale.

“Human agency is socio-historically restricted, which means that individuals can

become active social performers, yet under the restriction of certain conditions”. So
Stefanos Gimatzidis and Reinhard Jung in their initial description of what they were
hoping to do in this conference, before setting out the aim of the conference as “not to
test the theoretical models under scrutiny, but rather to present evidence against the
rationalization of past economic behavior according to the rules of modern markets”.
This is not a paper that presents significant new evidence; I am interested in what
the evidence that we have already to hand enables us to say, and in establishing the
conditions which any claims about past economic behaviour need to satisfy. The
pattern which Gimatzidis and Jung noted, whereby “In the first half of the twentieth
century, cultural historical approaches projected modern economic models into the
past through a rather formalist perspective; processual archaeology attempted to
quantify these relations; finally, post-processual critique emphasized the role of the
individual in shaping ancient economic patterns”, certainly applies to the study of
trade in Greek pottery. Robert Cook’s classic 1959 paper established the small scale
of the Athenian pot “industry”, and David Gill (1991) was still primarily concerned
to deny that pottery was an important item of trade in its own right. Work since
the 1990s has been particularly concerned with establishing individual patterns and
emphasising the different ways in which different potters manipulated the market

R. Osborne (B)
King’s College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
e-mail: ro225@cam.ac.uk

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 223

S. Gimatzidis and R. Jung (eds.), The Critique of Archaeological Economy,
Frontiers in Economic History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_12
224 R. Osborne

(most obviously through adapting the shape of products to conform to models with
which the market was already familiar, in the case of the Nikosthenes workshop
(Tosto, 1999), or the ways in which particular iconographies were sought out by
particular places (again primarily with regard to the question of Etruscan taste for
particular themes)). These recent studies have left us with a lot of evidence, but what,
in economic terms, does that evidence amount to?
This paper is primarily concerned with patterns in the spatial and chronological
distribution of (largely Athenian) pottery across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
But it is important first of all to establish something of the total quantity. The recent
work of Philip Sapirstein is important here. Sapirstein has argued that Beazley’s
attributions produce an implausibly large number of painters to whom few pots
can be attributed. He suggests that in the first half of the fifth century, when Attic
vase painting was at its height, there were just over 40 potter-painters and around 30
specialist painters, and that between them they produced around 50,000 pots a year (of
which between 0.5 and 1.00% have survived [Sapirstein, 2013, 2014]). Sapirstein’s
estimates more or less halve Robert Cook’s calculations as to numbers of painters,
and keep the scale of the industry in Athens small. But what I want to emphasise
is less the number of potters, painters and workshops than the number of pots in
question. Athenian fine pottery was produced and consumed in large quantities, and
the chances that the patterns we can see emerging are the products of differential
survival are extremely slim. For all that we have lost a great deal of invaluable
information in losing the findspots of so many pots, our data remain robust.
Pottery is vital for our understanding of the economy for three reasons: it survives
better than anything else—it is not perishable; it cannot be repurposed easily (as
metals can be by melting down); and it is produced in sufficiently varied forms and
with sufficiently varied decoration that those engaged in transporting it and/or those
buying it face repeated choices. Some, but not all, of those choices relate to function,
and some, but not all, of the functional choices relate to culturally chosen rather
than practically imposed affordances. Any economic modelling needs to answer
the question, who made what choices and for what reasons? If some sectors of the
economy were driven by need alone, this sector of the economy was not.
What are the patterns of pottery distribution that any economic model needs to
take into account? (cf. Langridge-Noti, 2013).
Uncontroversial are the claims that not every shape of pot nor every potter/painter
is represented at every place to which Athenian pots get sent. So we can not only
show that some potters/painters were more popular in some places than others, but
that different shapes, even among the works of a single potter/painter, are found in
different places. Somehow or other the market discriminates, and arguably from at
least 600 onwards for Athenian pottery, between potters/painters and between shapes
(so already Osborne, 1996).
More controversial, but I think widely accepted, in at least general terms, what
ends up where is not independent of quality: the market discriminates according
to quality (cf. Moore, 1997). The lowest quality Athenian pots do not end up in
Etruria—the distribution of works by the Pithos painter, whose low-quality works
primarily go east, is telling here: Beazley records pieces from Athens (11), Gela (6),
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic … 225

Adria (3), “Italy” (1), Olynthos (1), Vrastina Kalyvia near Thessaloniki (2), Rhitsona
(1), Corinth (1), Perachora (1), Rheneia (1), Chios (1), Kameiros (4), “Rhodes” (1),
Marion (1), Tell-en Nasbeh (1), Al Mina (10), Tel Jemmeh (1), Tell Abu Hawam (1)
(Beazley, 1963: 139–142).
Most controversial is the question of whether the market discriminates according
to the scenes painted on pots. Some scholars maintain that some myths and some non-
mythological scenes were particularly desired in some places, and that there were
regional or more local preferences for particular scenes that significantly affected
supply and demand. There are three reasons why this issue has proved controversial
and hard to resolve. First, that whereas shape is relatively easily established, and even
painters’ hands can be clear from relatively small fragments, iconography is harder
to establish from fragments. Second, although shapes come in a wide range, that
range is nothing to the variety of iconographies; many scenes occur just a handful
of times, and given the high proportion of pots that survive without provenance, it
is very common for the sample of surviving examples of a particular scene which
have a secure provenance to be too small to draw conclusions from. Third, although
the relationship is not direct, shape and iconography are not independent variables—
some scenes occur only on particular shapes of pot. Add to all these the practical
problem that no complete collection of material ordered by iconography is available
(Beazley’s lists, and hence the Beazley archive, are list of pots that Beazley considered
that he could attribute to the hands of particular painters or workshops).
That it was possible for someone to order specific pots, that is pots of a specific
shape and/or specific iconography is not to be doubted (cf. Webster, 1972: 42–
62). One clear case is provided by the series of uniquely shaped white-ground cups
with unique iconography attributed to Sotades and the Sotades painter found in an
Athenian grave. The iconography of these scenes is linked to death and rebirth and it,
along with the delicate and shape of the cups, points strongly to the pots having been
made and decorated for inclusion in this burial—perhaps even ordered in advance by
the deceased (Burn, 1985; Hoffmann, 1997). A different sort of case, and one that is
very hard fully to understand, is represented by the Pronomos Painter’s name vase,
a volute crater found in Ruvo, decorated with a unique scene of a satyr chorus “off
stage”, in which the actors are given “real” names and featuring the known auletes
Pronomos of Thebes (Taplin & Wiles, 2010). How this pot came to end up in Ruvo
is a mystery, but that it was made to order cannot be doubted. Whatever in the end,
and I shall return to the issue, we think about the case of the Etruscans (cf. Osborne,
2001), the model we have of trade in Athenian pottery has to allow for the possibility
of specific orders.
In general, indeed, the most important conclusion that must be drawn from the
data is the most basic one: no model of exchange in archaic and classical Greece that
would produce random distribution of the works of painters and random distribution
of pottery shapes can be supported. So we can dismiss a situation where both the
middlemen of the exchange, the distributors, acquired pottery indiscriminately and
also the end-point of the exchange, the consumers of pottery, acquired pottery indis-
criminately. Discrimination is certainly being exercised, whether by the distributors
226 R. Osborne

or by the consumers or both, and that discrimination extends certainly to shape and
quality, and plausibly both to decoration and to painter.
We can go at least a step further than this: any model where there are discriminating
consumers but not discriminating distributors is implausible. Are we to think that
distributors travelled with a random sample every time, that the consumers always
picked out the same items, and that the distributor every time went back with the
same items unsold, yet picked up more similar items on the next occasion? Short of
our finding that there were some accept-all consumers at the end of some putative
trading routes, who always took whatever the distributor had left, we have to believe
that distributors did not repeatedly take random selections of pots. How fast and how
accurately they predicted the preferences of the consumers they served we cannot tell,
but the existence of the patterns we have guarantees that there was indeed a process
of matching going on, and that this was done at least in part by the distributors.
But on what criteria was discrimination happening? Some of the discrimination
is relatively crude. Because shape and function are closely related, distributors who
had some idea of what use pots were being put to would have some idea of what
shapes of pot might be in demand. So in the archaic period, one way of reading the
material from Tocra in Libya, where the sanctuary of Demeter turned out to have a
very high proportion of plates, is that merchants who knew that pots were required
as dedications made sure that they had plates handy. So too the funerary custom at
Spina of including in the grave a krater and drinking vessels to form a symposium
set (Langridge-Noti, 2013) will have encouraged distributors to ensure that they had
such symposium sets for sale.
Discrimination at this level might be consistent with a range of models. Although
it continues to be popular to imagine an early Iron Age world in which the spread
of knowledge about the world is very limited, there are strong reasons—above all
the spread of the alphabet, but also the differential use of orientalising motifs—for
thinking that communication was already lively by the eighth century BCE. I have
argued elsewhere that the marked regional and local patterns of the eighth century
are a product of knowledge, and of conscious local discrimination, not a product of
ignorance (Osborne, 2018b). The more familiar we think that individuals across the
Greek world were with what else was happening in the central Mediterranean, the
less we have to invoke highly specialist distributors.
Precisely what sort of knowledge was required in order to meet the different
demands of different markets for pottery? At least issues such as whether one is
dealing with a Greek community whose religious practices are closely comparable
to one’s own are likely to have been unproblematic to establish. Indeed, if we take
Herodotos as our example of the sorts of things that those who move around the Greek
world notice, the particular gods who are primarily worshipped would be likely to
be known—whether this was a community where Demeter was a major deity or one
where Apollo was, for instance. Herodotos’ curiosity about burial customs operates
only on the most general level, but few who had spent time in a community can have
been unaware of funerary practices, and the basic determinants of what and how
much pottery might be consumed in burials were easily observed—whether they
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic … 227

cremated, or inhumed; whether they used sarcophagi or cist graves; whether there
was a funerary banquet.
It is indeed to be noted that “windfall” profits for merchants are spoken of only in
relation to being blown outside the Pillars of Herakles (Herodotus 4.152 of Kolaios
making a massive profit from ending up at Tartessos). Equally, novelties might be
widely distributed initially and then catch on only in some places, or in none. Shefton
suggested that black and coral-red cups were intended specifically to recall the gold
or silver gilt work of luxury vessels, and it is unsurprising, if this is the case, that
such fake-luxury ceramics proved widely attractive, from Cyprus to Ampurias, even
if they did not then catch on in a big way (see Padgett, 2009: 227).
If we reckon that there was enough movement of individuals around the central
Mediterranean to ensure that those living there were widely knowledgeable about
that world, and if we are dealing with discrimination merely at the level of what sorts
of pottery gets deposited in graves or dedicated in temples or used in households,
then we need presuppose relatively little specialisation on the part of distributors.
Those planning a cargo for a specific region would be able to find enough general
knowledge of that region and particular knowledge about the different settlements
in that region to judge the pots to ship that would have best chances of selling.
The prejudice of excavations towards those sites likely to be most discriminating—
sanctuaries and cemeteries—makes it likely that we over-estimate the degree of
discrimination to some extent. Were we to have sufficient domestic excavations we
might find the domestic assemblages showing a distinctly wider and more variable
range, as homes absorbed pots not suitable for sanctuary or grave. But at the same
time, it was the practices of dedication and deposition in graves that were the largest
pottery consumers, taking pottery immediately out of circulation, the most public,
and the most governed by custom; hence targeting pot use in these contexts was
arguably easier than targeting the markets for domestic pottery.
Crucial to the question of whether merchants demanded specialist knowledge of
the places with which they traded is the issue of exactly how fine the discrimination
between markets was. Here Michael Shanks’ work on Corinthian pots is particularly
striking. He found (1999: Fig. 4.5) that while around 30% of friezes on earlier
Corinthian pots (from the 7th century) in mainland and Aegean cemeteries contained
people, none of the friezes in “colonial and Italian” cemeteries did so, and only
about 10% of friezes on vessels from sanctuaries did so. By contrast, there were no
birds on friezes from mainland and Aegean cemeteries, but around 15% of friezes
from sanctuaries and from “colonial and Italian” cemeteries show birds (Shanks,
1999: Fig. 4.6). Comparably, among later Corinthian friezes from mainland, and
from “colonial and Italian” cemeteries a negligible number are made up of ornament,
but some 20% of friezes from sanctuaries are made up of ornament. It seems unlikely
that even those who noticed what sort of pot was deposited or dedicated would have
consciously registered what the pot showed, and knowledge of local and use-specific
taste of this sort can hardly have been common. In this case, some very specific
information seems to be moving down the line, and must be moving between people
who have a direct interest in the production, exchange and consumption of pottery.
228 R. Osborne

The same conclusion emerges from the fine distinctions between different
Etruscan markets apparent in, for instance, their consumption of products of the
Nikosthenic workshop. Cerveteri is the findspot of all Nikosthenic black-figure
amphoras of known provenance found in Italy (one was found on the Athenian
acropolis) but otherwise, the only Nikosthenic pot found at Cerveteri is a red-figure
pyxis. From Vulci, on the other hand, come 12 Nikosthenic cups, three olpai and two
phialai. Only three other Nikosthenic pots of known provenance come from Etruria
(two from Tarquinia and one from Orvieto). All Nikosthenic skyphoi of known prove-
nance come from the Athenian acropolis (Tosto, 1999: 201 and Appendices B and C;
cf. Reusser, 2002). The absence of amphoras from Vulci and of cups from Cerveteri
is so striking that it cannot be a matter of chance. It is made more striking by the fact
that cups from other Attic workshops appear in Cerveteri in cemetery, sanctuary and
domestic contexs, and amphoras of other workshops in Vulci at least in cemetery
contexts (Reusser, 2002). This looks to be a case where the discovery by a particular
trader that a particular market is differentially keen on a particular shape of pot leads
to their taking only pots of that shape to that market.
In the case of discrimination by shape, it is not hard to imagine that any regular
exchange links between an Etruscan city and Athens could lead to widespread knowl-
edge that some places were simply not interested in pots of a particular shape. But
it is harder to imagine it to have been general knowledge that Vulci liked amphoras
but not Nikosthenic amphoras, or that Cervetri liked cups but not Nikosthenic cups.
It is harder still to imagine that Italian sanctuaries articulated their interest in vessels
decorated with ornament in such a way that this became general knowledge, or that
“colonial and Italian” cemeteries had a stated policy of avoiding friezes with people
on earlier Corinthian pottery—particularly when that prejudice disappears in later
Corinthian pottery.
In this last case, we must believe either (1) that merchants persistently found
themselves not selling particular pots, observed what it was about these pots that
made them unattractive, and gave up supplying them, until that knowledge died and
when another merchant came along with the full range of scenes the market decided
to purchase what it had previously avoided; or (2) that merchants did not observe
what the market was and was not buying, kept trying to sell the same sorts of pots,
and that after many years of having to take the figured part of their stock away again
unsold, eventually found themselves selling figure scenes after all; or (3) that it so
happened that the merchants from whom colonial and Italian sanctuaries were buying
happened for many years to frequent only those workshops of Corinthian pottery that
did not specialise in figures. Given that the pattern persists over some time and that
it is unlikely that all such cemeteries were served by the same merchants, one of the
former explanations seems preferable.
Not all who carried Greek pottery to consumers outside Greece will have been
equally knowledgeable, and the more discriminating the consumers, the more lack
of knowledge among the sellers will have reduced the proportion of the stock carried
that was sold, and so undermined the profits to be made. There was an incentive
for merchants to finding out whether it was worth carrying a particular shape of
pottery to a particular place. There was therefore an incentive to establishing regular
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic … 229

exchange over relying on serendipity. Such regular exchange will have allowed for,
and is a necessary prerequisite for, orders, whether for particular pots with singular
decoration or writing or simply for particular sorts of pot. But such regular exchange
is also likely to have been conservative, with every cargo tending to replicate the
last cargo. Such regular exchange may indeed effectively impose the tastes of the
shipper upon the consumers; a seller who has decided, perhaps on the basis of an
initial experience of difficulty selling particular pots in a particular place, that a
particular set of items sells well (or does not sell at all) at a particular place may well
produce a dominance (or a complete absence) of those items in that place, whether
or not the consumers there would really limit their purchases in those ways, given a
chance.
The strength of the patterns might be thought to show that consumers did have
strong preferences. But they might equally, as in the last scenario discussed, suggest
that there was little competition among suppliers. In a situation where one shipper
has decided to offer only the narrow set of items that, in their experience, sells, but
where other shippers arrive with no idea about the preferences of that market or with
discrepant views of the market, then unless the first shipper has got the preferences
dead right, the second shipper will manage to sell a wide range of forms, and the
assemblage will lose its strongly discriminating features.
The data we have on the distribution of Corinthian and Athenian pottery alike
during the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries require that general knowledge of who
wanted what was widely shared across the societies of at least the central Mediter-
ranean and the Black Sea. But the data also require that some involved in moving
goods around had very particular knowledge about local demand, knowledge that
certainly involved what shapes of pot were being used for what purpose, and what
quality of pottery was required, but which may have included knowledge of what
sorts of decoration were preferred in particular situations. We can think of this knowl-
edge as acquired by trial and error, by market survey or by sharing in the life of
the consumer society for long enough to absorb a sense of what those consumers
expected. To differentiate between these models we need a better sense of the rhythms
and timing of exchange in this world, but at least for the core central Mediterranean
world we can exclude some extreme models:
i. down the line trade: a shipper dumps a cargo at a port and the goods trickle
down to other markets;
ii. tramping: a shipper goes on from place to place, dropping off whatever can be
sold at a particular location (We might wonder whether import and export taxes
discouraged this anyway: did a merchant have to pay import tax on everything
he put on sale? and did he then have to pay export tax on what he failed to sell
and took with him to the next port?).
iii. windfalls: relying on arriving at a place with goods so unusual that they can
be sold for a great profit, and not expecting ever to return again (Homer’s
Phoenicians)
iv. retail chain stores: everywhere there are branches of essentially the same retail
outlet selling the same lines.
230 R. Osborne

The seller may not have directly known the consumer, in the way that Finley and his
fellow-travellers once assumed, but the seller exercised a significant amount of local
knowledge. Exchange can be reckoned to have involved a high degree of knowledge,
the advantage of which was a low degree of wastage.
But where does the producer—the potter, and more particularly the painter—
come in this story? How far was what was produced influenced by what merchants
came back and ordered? Here the data point in different directions. In as far as
there are pots that are individually commissioned, the production and the product
were entirely determined by the customer. That applies too to some specialist pots.
For instance, Panathenaic amphoras go on being produced, and produced in what
came to be an obsolete technique, because of the specific demand for these items
to satisfy a particular market. Production of the krateriskoi particularly associated
with sanctuaries of Artemis in Attica may be another instance where both shape
and decoration were entirely determined by a specialist market, and the producer
was entirely reactive, if not to individual commissions then to the existence of this
particular market niche. But how far is this to be generalised?
Two features of Athenian pottery production demand consideration here. One
is the resistance to repetition (see Osborne, 2018a: 36–40; cf. also Stissi, 2014).
Although there are a small number of pots that appear to replicate other pots exactly,
the proportion of such repeated images in the whole Attic vase production is vanish-
ingly small. We might explain this in two different ways. One explanation would be
that very large numbers of pots were made to order, and those orders were specific
enough to demand constant iconographic innovation by painters, even within a single
theme. But this explanation is hardly plausible. There are many scenes that can be
described in essentially the same terms (“athlete standing scraping himself with a
strigil; boundary stone of gymnasium behind him”; “soldier takes helmet from a
women facing him”), yet visually these scenes are distinct. It would simply not have
been possible for a customer who was not actually in the workshop at the moment
the pot was painted to determine the exact appearance and ensure that this soldier
taking his helmet was different from other soldiers taking their helmets. We are
therefore left with the other explanation, that the painter determined the nature of the
scene, and that variation is a consequence of technique—there were no advantages
to reproducing identical scenes for an able artist—and no one who was not an able
artist would survive long in the business (Beazley [1963: 1353–1354] ascribed only
22 pots, all from Spina, to the artist whom he named “the Worst Painter”).
The question, however, is how far this painterly initiative went. Did it extend only
to the precise disposition of figures on a pot, or did it apply, in general, to the subject?
Important here is the evidence for change over time. As I have recently sought to
show (Osborne, 2018a), there was a sea-change in the iconographic content of scenes
on Athenian red-figure pottery between early red-figure pots of the years down to
the Persian Wars and classical red-figure pots of the middle of the fifth century.
This sea-change did not so much involve whole areas of imagery going out of, or
coming into fashion, though there was some of that—most notoriously scenes of
explicit sexual activity are very largely limited to early red-figure pots and absent
from classical red-figure pottery—rather, it involved a different, and more restricted
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic … 231

range of imagery featuring on classical than on earlier red-figure pottery. Essentially

early red-figure pots are more interested in quirky individual scenes, more interested
in competition, and more interested in people doing things, often doing things to other
people. Classical red-figure pots are more interested in people contemplating doing
things, or contemplating having done things—warriors caught at the last moment
before they leave the house to go to war, athletes caught scraping themselves down
after athletics or standing with jumping weights in their hand receiving a talking
to before they go jump; they are more interested also in how people relate to one
another.
The relevance of this change of iconography to the question of the nature of the
pottery trade rests with the fact that the change of iconography is a general one. That
is, this is not a matter of individual scenes becoming more or less popular, something
that might result from a scene initially being painted to the order of a customer, or a
middleman, and then “catching on”, in the way that Exekias’ scene of Achilles and
Aias dicing seems to have “caught on” in the latter half of the sixth century (whatever
motivated Exekias to choose that scene in the first place). Rather, this is a matter of
the taste for action and competition being replaced by a taste for contemplation and
collaboration—even in the case of types of action where in real-life competition
and action continued to be manifested, as they must have been in both warfare and
athletics. Did such a general change stem from changing customer tastes, or from
the changing tastes of the producers?
Our answer to that question is going to depend on the homogeneity of the world
which consumed Athenian pottery. If we think that essentially the whole Mediter-
ranean world, or at least the Mediterranean world that was in touch with Greece,
constituted a single co-ordinated community, with shared values and tastes, then we
can imagine the change of imagery to be a consequence of the changing tastes of
consumers. “Something in the air” will have persuaded the whole community of the
Mediterranean that was in touch with Greece to think less competitively and more
contemplatively in the middle of the fifth century than in the previous generations.
And, given that not all the world that was in touch with Greece had been threatened
by Persian or Phoenician attack, that “something in the air” cannot have been the
“barbarian wars” repulsed in 480 and 479 BCE.
Such homogeneity in the Mediterranean world that was in touch with Greece
is, however, implausible. There are many ways in which life in Etruria in the fifth
century BCE was distinct from the life of Greek cities in these years, just as there are
many ways in which it had been distinctive in the sixth century. The imagery that we
find in Etruscan tombs reinforces this point, since the iconography of painted tombs
is highly distinctive, for all that it shares motifs and techniques with the Greek world.
And if the Mediterranean world that was in touch with Greece was not homogenous,
and was not all demanding the same changes to the selection of scenes on painted
pottery at the same time, then the impetus for change must have come either from
the artists, or alternatively, but less plausibly, from one particular set of customers
(with the artists assuming that changes which they found themselves asked for by
some of their customers would go down well also with other customers).
232 R. Osborne

The quantity of Athenian pottery found in Etruria declines over the course of the
fifth century. There may be all sorts of reasons for that decline, many of them to
do with what was happening in Etruria itself. But that decline certainly allows for
the possibility that the changes in the sorts of scenes that were painted on Athenian
pottery may not have been changes that the Etruscans found altogether attractive.
Just as earlier, in the sixth century, what was on offer from Corinthian potters seems
to have been found steadily less attractive than what was on offer from Athenian
potters, so too, in the course of the later fifth century, what came to be on offer from
potters and painters in southern Italy came to be more attractive locally than what
was on offer from Athens.
If we are correct to reckon that those engaged in the pottery trade knew a lot
about their markets, and chose the pots that they traded to fit with what they knew
those markets liked, then we have also to recognise that they could only exercise that
knowledge upon a body of material that Athenian potters and painters had produced or
were willing to produce. That is, the merchant’s choice was limited by decisions made
by the potter and painter. Merchants could hint about certain shapes being favoured, or
indeed press for certain sorts of scenes to be painted, but it was the painters’ changing
tastes that determined the limits of the available stock. The painters’ tastes may well
have been shared by, indeed shaped by, the community of which they themselves
were part—something suggested by the way in which sculpture produced across the
Greek world, and indeed the wall paintings of which non-Athenians were the most
famous exponents, were marked by similar changes in iconographic choice. But
for all that Nikosthenes, at the end of the sixth century, tried producing specifically
Etruscan-shaped pots for the Etruscan market, no painter of pots in the middle of
the fifth century stuck to the old iconographic choices that had sold so well there.
If merchants tried to persuade them to do so, they simply failed: painters could be
persuaded to paint particular subjects, but not to paint those subjects in a particular
way.
There are arguably big historical conclusions lurking in these changing patterns of
pottery consumption. That the Etruscans in the sixth century voraciously consumed
the particular view of the world pedalled by Athenian black-figure and early red-
figure artists (Osborne, 2001) says something about the extent to which the compet-
itive culture centred on male performance and the drinking of alcohol was shared
across the Mediterranean. That classical Athenian red-figure pottery was less vora-
ciously consumed says something about the limits to the extent to which classical
Greek culture was shared outside the Greek-speaking world—one might note here
the degree to which the popularity of classical Athenian pottery and the popularity
of Greek theatre coincided (on theatre see Bosher, 2012).
There are also conclusions for the way in which we model trade. If we are to rule
out down-the-line trade, tramping, windfalls, and chain stores, we are also to rule
out a market shaped by producer reaction to customer surveys. Trade depended upon
the knowledge possessed and used by the middleman, who selected from available
goods to match, as best he could, the known preferences of those to whom he sold.
This was effectively a world of specialist stores, which stocked what they considered
their market to want. But they could only stock what the manufacturers chose to
12 Modelling Trade in Athenian Pottery in the Archaic … 233

make. And when it came to figured pottery, too much was bound up in the nature of
the figurative decoration for anything to be possible. For the scenes on pots carried a
world view, not in the sense that they showed everything that went on in the world,
but in the sense that they carried a way of seeing what went on in the world, a way of
seeing that was actually highly selective. Painters arguably simply could not see in
the middle of the fifth century what they had been able to see at the end of the sixth
century. Just as the only way for a late fifth-century poet to write Homeric epic or
Aeschylean tragedy was as parody (cf. Aristophanes’ Frogs), so “archaizing” scenes
on Panathenaic amphoras come to seem parodic. Arguably, successful marketing
depended not merely on merchants who selected wisely but upon the ability of the
painted pottery that was on sale to persuade those to whom it was offered to share
its way of seeing the world. As in the modern world, not all changes of fashion
in clothing are found persuasive by all markets, so in antiquity, there was a limit
to how immediately persuasive the vision of the world offered at a particular point
by Athenian pot-painters proved to be. The image, as well as the potter, painter,
merchant and consumer, must be allowed some agency in this story.

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