In the beginning

If early hominids exchanged goods outside the immediate group to which they belonged, no archaeological evidence of it exists. Forager bands gathered materials in one location on their migratory rounds and transported them some distances – modern foraging groups normally do this up to a range of about 50 miles – but there is no indication they exchanged them with other groups. Archaeological evidence seems to indicate, for example, that Neanderthal groups, representing the closest relatives to anatomically modern humans, didn’t trade with each other as the tools they made stayed with them. The same kind of evidence, however, seems to indicate that members of our own species may have engaged in such behavior very early on. Anatomically modern humans living in a cave in Tanzania between 100,000 and 130,000 years ago had tools made of obsidian, the closest deposit of which was 200 miles away, several times beyond the range of normal foraging. The most obvious conclusion is that this indicates the presence of an early exchange network. Exchange between people living considerable distances from each other,

beyond the range of normal movement, and perhaps other changes associated with the Late Paleolithic, may have been part of a strategy to deal with increased environmental stress, specifically the last glacial onslaught. One idea is that the earliest trade probably occurred when hunting bands accidentally bumped into each other and each discovered it had something the other wanted. This is certainly a reasonable, if unprovable, scenario, keeping in mind, however, that dealing with strangers in the Paleolithic world was unpredictable and may have been dangerous, so most exchange took place among groups who were connected to each other. Exchange was done through social networks determined by family and clan affiliations. Connected groups could stretch across vast areas although the exchanges that occurred were at best occasional and unsystematic. Social networks were held together by periodic meetings at special sites, during which a variety of activities was held to cement relationships. These included rituals and initiations, feasting, the selection of marriage partners, the exchange of information, and the exchange of goods particular to the area from which

each group came. This was likely done in a group setting, not as an individual activity. The guiding principle was reciprocity, symbolizing the promise of mutual assistance, not profit. Paleolithic exchange did not generally involve goods that were necessary

for everyday living. Items could have some practical use as, for example, allies could exchange weapons made from local stone. Most likely, articles that traveled long distances had ritual or social value, such as carved figurines or ocher for skin application. The use of ornaments for personal decoration, including beads, necklaces, bracelets, and pendants made of bone, antler, animal teeth, shell, and stone, became popular. The distance an object traveled became a measure of its worth. Being exotic, that is, coming from outside one’s immediate range, provided an appeal in itself and, because it was special, it made its owner special. By traveling far, even a mundane object could become valuable as in the case of certain kinds of flint and attractive seashells that were transported hundreds of miles. Shell beads made from a certain snail species have turned up in Morocco

dated to 82,000 years ago. The same style of beads from the same species made at roughly the same time has also been found in neighboring Algeria and distant Israel, prompting speculation on the existence of an exchange system or perhaps even an early form of currency, however improbable. Improbability turned into impossibility when in 2004 similar beads turned up in South Africa, sparking a media furor over the possibility of a prehistoric trans-African economy. But coincidence can play funny tricks; the skill is in determining where coincidence ends and serious consideration should begin. Most informed observers, trained to be skeptical of unfounded speculation and determined to use common sense in such cases, still consider the African snail enigma a curious bit of coincidence. About 10,000 years ago, the world began a radical transformation as

people settled down and started to domesticate plants and animals. According to one model, people tended to congregate in places that were crossroads for exchange and commercial activity. In the relatively small area of Southwest Asia where Asia, Europe, and Africa come together, the interaction of ideas and technologies and the exchange of goods were especially active. There, agriculture was first born, bringing a great increase in exchange. For a while, agriculturalists swapped products with the remaining hunter-gatherers such as, for example, wild animal meat and honey for grain, beer, and pottery, with neither of the participants dependent on the other for subsistence. The emergence of pastoralist societies offering dairy products, meat, and leather to agriculturalists provided an even greater stimulus for trade. Communities were still bound within ceremonial systems where valuables, as defined by their high symbolic content, were exchanged. Social alliances were the motivating consideration rather than cost-benefit analysis. Products could serve a range of purposes, and their significance could change as they circulated. Axes, for example, made from exotic stone

and deposited as votive offerings, sometimes show considerable wear, indicating that at one time they were employed for practical use but later became ceremonial objects. Periodic meetings were no longer the principal venue for exchange; now groups were linked in chains, each link having access to some resource the others desired. Commercial trade in a marketplace setting, where strangers were engaged

in profit-driven entrepreneurial behavior, was as dangerous in the Neolithic as groups bumping into each other were in the Paleolithic. Dealing with people from different places with whom one did not have formal ties required assurances of security, which in the early Neolithic was usually not available. Goods generally moved in a linear fashion in what is referred to as a down-the-line system or percolated through one community to another in a trickle trade system so that, when traced, they decrease in proportion to the distance from their source. Items traveled farther than people so that no one had to move beyond his own territory. In the later Neolithic, distribution patterns show signs of change. Most

exchange was still between people who knew each other and was based on reciprocity although some transactions may have included elements of commercial trade such as bargaining. Likewise most goods continued to be sent down-the-line and often circulated over a period of generations but over increasingly larger areas. Some goods were also beginning to be sent directionally, that is, direct from their source to a specific location bypassing areas in between. Shells from the Indian Ocean have turned up in fifthmillennium BCE Syria, almost 1,000 miles away. As Neolithic economies allowed for steady population rise, more people fueled a demand for more goods. Larger, more stable communities attracted people with something to swap. Between 6250 and 5400 BCE, the largest of these communities was Catal Huyuk in south central Anatolia. At its height Catal Huyuk may have had a population of 4,000-6,000, making it the largest known settlement in the world at the time. Its inhabitants grew wheat and barley and traded cattle, which had the great advantage of transporting itself. They also traded obsidian from a nearby source, for which there was a great demand elsewhere. The ruins of Catal Huyuk contain an extraordinary quantity of imported material featuring shells from the Mediterranean and different kinds of exotic stones. Around the Mediterranean long-distance trade did not wait for the rise of

cities and states. People in boats were coast hugging from shore to island and island to island carrying and exchanging goods. This varied in scale from fishermen who did part-time trading to peddlers who stopped at villages along the coast to see what the locals had to offer. Many Neolithic sites were located near natural deposits of desirable stone. Cores and preforms, which had been roughed out or undergone some preliminary shaping and would be made into products elsewhere, as well as finished products such as blades, were sent out. Some settlements were composed of specialized craftsmen who

manufactured products for export, such as ceramics or tanned hides. One rock that did not have to be crafted into a product was salt. The Paleolithic diet of wild animal meat had provided sufficient salt to satisfy human needs, but the Neolithic diet featuring principally cereals often did not, necessitating the development of the salt trade. As agriculture spread into places such as central and northern Europe, vast

forests had to be cleared, creating a demand for axes. The axe was a functional tool, but it also became an important prestige item, a symbol of maleness. Because it could be both utilitarian and ceremonial and was a high-demand product, the trade in axes may have had more of a commercial bent than either the giving of prestige gifts or the bartering of basic subsistence goods. Exactly when professional traders guided by an entrepreneurial ethos and operating on strictly market principles entered the scene, however, remains a matter of sometimes ferocious debate among archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Some axe-producing operations were quite large. In the fifth and fourth

millennia BCE, quarries in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France produced axe-heads of aphanite, a black rock with close texture. Partially finished objects were transported to nearby villages where they were made into polished axes, then exported over an east-west exchange network that extended as far as Switzerland. An even more widespread system involved jadeite, a fine-grained light green rock obtained from the western Alpine regions of France and Italy and sent over three different routes reaching from Scotland to southern Spain. The Irish made a large portion of their axes from porcellanite, a hard, dense, siliceous rock that looks like unglazed porcelain. Although only a few sources of it existed, all of which were located on the northeast corner of the island, porcellanite axes spread throughout Ireland and into Britain. The most important stone used in Europe during the Neolithic Period was

flint, considered especially desirable for making daggers, spears, and sickles as well as axes. Early exploitation of flint deposits was done seasonally by pastoralists or on an episodic basis by small groups rather than by permanently stationed workforces. Eventually some flint mines came to be quite large as at one site in Poland where the minefield covered an area 2.5 miles long and included 1,000 mineshafts, some reaching 36 feet deep. Archaeologists have located trader hoards of flint daggers in remote northern Sweden. Often in a given archaeological site both local and non-local flint implements can be found together, the non-local flint having come from different sources at varying distances away. Different varieties of flint were more highly prized than others, with chocolate-colored being the most favored even though from a purely functional standpoint it made no better implements. Indeed exotic axes in general were sometimes made from stones that were not as suitable as local varieties. Even more peculiar, people often chose to exploit rock sources that were difficult or even dangerous to access,

working, for example, on narrow ledges in exposed highland areas, even when acceptable substitutes were available closer to home and under far more favorable conditions. The increased prominence of prestige items in the archaeological record

indicates an important socio-political change that appears in later Neolithic societies. Hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists lived in basically egalitarian, acephalous societies. Different people enjoyed different status as, for example, elders and shamans, but there were no social hierarchies. Beginning in the fourth millennium BCE, the importance of social dominance and eventually the appearance of ranking and the assumption of power became more evident. In the struggle to determine who would emerge on top, the control over access to outside exchange networks became a key factor. Longdistance trade, social differentiation, and power concentration were all fueled by the development of metallurgy. During the Bronze Age, which began c. 3000 BCE, the trade in both raw metals and finished metal products grew enormously. Metals became associated with high prestige. Ornaments of gold replaced shell, and ceremonial axes came to be made of copper and bronze. Daggers and spears, drinking cups, lurs (large S-shaped bronze trumpets), equipment used for horseriding and charioteering, jewelry and other ornaments, and, above all, swords became the items of choice in exchange systems. Other products became available with the use of wool-producing sheep, which provided a basis for the textile industry, and the spread of horse domestication. Local communities became more interconnected, and regional exchange systems became interregional. Trade helped to promote the rise of political power and the development

of social inequality: where wealth accumulated, leaders emerged, and eventually states formed. If the key to power was control over wealth, those who controlled long-distance trade may have imposed themselves over the old kinship structure of society and emerged as a ruling class. Or perhaps the ruling class did not emerge from traders but came instead from the ranks of the tribal chiefs, that is, people who already had political power. Again, however, the procurement and distribution of wealth was the means to power. Wealth from trade provided a leader with the ability to pay for an army that could be used to get the rest of the community to obey him. And, by controlling trade, he had access to prestige goods from the outside, which he used to attract clients, creating a system of ranks in a structure that became the state. In such a system, the ruler determined who would have access to what; in

other words, he regulated demand as well as supply. The ruler and the elites who supported him would also have control over local specialists who made luxury items to be used as exports. Such a system was not based on commercialized market conditions in which luxury goods were sold to whoever was able to pay for them. Rather rulers defined the social and political status of others by controlling the system of wealth distribution. The flow of

prestige goods as gifts determined the hierarchy, and wealth in the form of exotic valuables validated one’s social status. Luxury goods were symbols of personal superiority, and the wearing, display, or consumption of them distinguished the elite from the common people. The larger a leader’s capacity for dispensing gifts, the greater his hold over those to whom he gave them and thus the greater his power. Prestige markers distributed downward forged loyalty; it was on them that political power was based. Utilitarian items continued to be exchanged, but the mass of common

people reaped little immediate benefit from the metals revolution. A few copper sickles may have been made in copper-rich areas, but bronze plows don’t usually appear next to bronze swords in hoards or among grave goods. As for the long-distance trade in luxury goods, its impact on the common people was hardly positive. Rather they ended up working harder in the fields, workshops, quarries, and mines to produce whatever was used for exchange by the elites to further their own status. Long-distance trade in the Bronze Age impacted not only within societies

but between them. Trade, gift exchange, and marriage links helped to lubricate relations between elites. Exchange systems were often designed so that elites could provide each other with the exotica needed to maintain power within their own spheres. Exchange did not have to take place directly between two parties. Participants were tied into a grid of exchange that allowed a giver to receive something in return from someone in the system that was not necessarily the direct recipient of his own gift. Rulers of equal stature were expected to exchange gifts equivalent in value, but if one could not match the other, he became obligated and thus inferior. A group that had better access to some prestige item through control over raw material could exert dominance over another group if its leaders needed the prestige material as a means for maintaining their superiority within their own group. But reciprocity was still the principle on which exchange was founded. The concept of making a profit in the sense of gaining a material surplus from an exchange was an idea whose time had not quite come. The expansion of trade routes and the assertion of control over them by

elites, the development of trade centers as places of wealth accumulation linking trade routes together, the formation of social hierarchies, the alignment of ranking among chiefs leading to paramount chiefs and ultimately chief-of-chiefs or king, and finally the emergence of state structures are best seen as interactive processes. By the close of the Bronze Age, long-distance exchange networks were in place from Italy to Sweden. Regions as peripheral as Hungary and Denmark were able to acquire large quantities of metal from considerable distances, transform it into finished products recognized for fine craftsmanship, and re-export them to other areas of considerable distance. Europe, however, was far from being the commercial center of Afro-Eurasia. Other, more central, places had earlier moved into more complex political and social forms, what is roughly referred to as “civilization.” The earliest of

these complex societies, Sumer and Egypt, arose in places that served as trade corridors. Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, had the metal-rich Anatolian highlands to the north and the Persian Gulf, leading into the Indian Ocean, to the south. In Egypt, the Nile Valley provided the only direct access between the Mediterranean basin and the interior of Africa. It was here in hot lands with lots of river water and an abundance of grain that trade would begin to spread its tentacles from interregional to intercontinental systems.