Regional exchange studies are not new and have preoccupied archaeologists since the nineteenth century. Chemical techniques have been used since the midnineteenth century on identifying the distribution of archaeological metal artifacts from Central Europe. Perhaps the most famous early study was by Anna Shepard who, in the 1930s and 1940s, postulated the exchange of pottery over wide areas of southwest United States by analyzing mineral inclusions in thin section to pinpoint the origins of such minerals. Yet, the importance of exchange in archaeology today arose out of a reorientation in the way archaeologists had perceived trade/exchange operating in the past. The realization that migrationist/invasion models could not adequately explain the distribution of material across the landscape, nor change in societies over time, led archaeologists to look at other mechanisms. Inspired by the works of economic anthropologists such as K. Polanyi, who defined three types of trade and exchange (reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange), and anthropologists such as B. Malinowski who studied trade and exchange in a Melanesian society, archaeologists realized that trade and exchange were embedded within the social and economic structures of society. By studying trade and exchange, the intention was to reconstruct the economies and organizations of past societies and their changes over time. The access to and control over prestige goods through trade and exchange was seen as a prime mover for change, leading to ranked societies.
A major proponent for the study of regional exchange systems was Colin Renfrew. In a classic paper on trade and culture process in European Prehistory published in 1969, Renfrew argued that trade was a causal factor for cultural change leading to the beginning of urbanization in the Aegean. An increase in trade with new wealth, craft specialization, and communication led to change from a ‘village subsistence economy into an urban society’. This was a marked shift away from inferring invasions or diffusion from a ‘higher culture’ to account for the Aegean Early Bronze Age.
From these earlier studies a number of influential edited volumes on the archaeology of regional exchange systems appeared in the 1970s and 1980s which covered an eclectic array of topics from the Old and New World and provided the benchmark for trade and exchange studies. These studies were important not only in identifying the movement of materials in the past but also in cementing links with the chemists, geologists, or physicists who undertook the physicochemical analysis that demonstrated that trade and exchange took place.
The collaboration of the latter group, in association with theoretical changes in archaeology, fuelled the development of regional exchange studies.
World History
