ABSTRACT
The exchange of goods is at first sight one of the easier facets of society for the archaeologist to detect. Metals and stones have perforce to be imported into South Mesopotamia, and survive relatively well in archaeological contexts. It is in theory possible to trace such raw materials to their geological origins, although there remain formidable practical difficulties. More productive of recent years has been the archaeological recovery of industrial activities in places far from Sumer but evidently engaged in the same trading network: in Oman for copper, south-west Iran for carved stone bowls, eastern Iran for lapis lazuli, the Indus for carnelian. To judge from these examples, long-distance trade was mostly in the processed raw materials rather than in finished products. Occasionally, though, a find stands out as the work of a foreign workshop, such as the Indus-style seals which have been found on Mesopotamian sites. Finally one must not ignore the physical evidence for the transactions of trade: documents, seals (and more especially seatings) and weights all derive from the procedures of commercial exchange and are sometimes our only evidence when the nature of the commodities exchanged has wiped them from the archaeological record. The multifarious ways in which the lively foreign trade of South Mesopotamia can be detected have meant that the subject has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, but the archaeologist also needs to understand the complementary evidence of the documentary sources, both because they create our expectations, and because they reveal salutary object lessons about the validity of some archaeological assumptions.
It is of course misleading to write about trade as though it were a single homogeneous system. Quite apart from the specialization of different routes mentioned below (p. 219), we need to distinguish the differing roles of trade in different social contexts. If we group items traded broadly into essentials, staples and luxuries, it is easy to see that each group has different correlates in society: the market for high luxuries must be an elite one, and a small one, while the staples trade plays to a certain sector of society which was involved in metal tool production or in the creation of textiles for export, and need not have seriously affected the lives of a majority of the population. On the other hand, everyone in society was concerned in one way or another with the supply of things like salt or grindstones, and we should not underestimate the value of long-standing exchange arangements for essentials in paving the way for more ambitious ventures. While the textual material tends to direct our attention to the more conspicuous items of consumption, archaeology is less socially discriminating and can help to restore the balance.
