ABSTRACT
Scholars of antiquity, and the archaic period in particular, are used to thinking in terms of Polanyi’s embedded economy and Mauss’ theory of ‘the gift’, both of which have been developed recently in various contexts, including David Graeber’s theory of value. At the same time, there is a strong New Institutional Economics trend in modern scholarship. From other directions we see a heavy emphasis on ‘elite’ behaviour while the ideas of connectivity and ecological niches continue to attract attention. Are these theories compatible? What kind of overarching theory of the archaic economy should we be developing which takes into account the evidence we have and contextualises it with other work on, for instance, ritualisation and urbanisation? This chapter explores where we may be heading with the notion of archaic trade; I argue for the embeddedness of the ancient economy in notions of immanence and the value of assemblage theory as a theoretical framework to explore the central importance of knowledge transmission.
