Economic relations are one fundamental key for understanding the workings and transitions of past societies and for grappling with how and why those societies varied. Although archaeology has many goals, addressing such big complicated issues about long-term societal variation and change is certainly at the forefront of much archaeological thought, and the broad range of field and analytic research that is synthesized here under the rubric of economic archaeology is essential for moving forward on these issues. Over the last 50 years or so, buoyed by a new corpus of techniques and ways to conceptualize the archaeological record, scholars have forged a more dynamic economic archaeology that has endeavored to determine not only what people ate and how they financed their central institutions but also how and why shifts in these basic relations affected the course of local and regional histories.
Through the comparative examination of production, distribution, consumption, and stratification in different global regions, the discipline has made great progress in defining the many diverse ways that past societies worked and also sometimes why they did not. Such data are important for enlightening aspects of the past that rarely find their ways into written histories. They also enable us to understand the histories and consequences of past economic strategies that have been employed, and in what ways do contemporary economic relations truly vary from the practices employed at different points in the human past. This is not trivial, as it is now allowing us to correct and modify the notions and theories of economists and social theorists about premodern economics that often were born in the context of little or inadequate empirical information.
Despite the advances that have been made, economic archaeology remains at a young stage. The menu of questions waiting to be tackled remains robust and multi-disciplinary in implication and approaches. Yet in many, if not most, regions of the world, we still lack the systematic regional (and even macroregional) settlement surveys, the intensive site-based studies with rigorous collection strategies, and the domestic excavation results that provide the starting point for many kinds of economic investigation. At the same time, many faunal and floral as well as compositional analyses remain at a largely descriptive level, estranged from the economic archaeological questions that they are so necessary to elucidate. Conceptually, we need to find broadly acceptable means to define marketing behavior and better ways to capture labor relations in the past. Finally, we must find a way to work systematically on the different scales of economic behavior from the macro - or world scale down to the transactions that took place between the co-residents of a house. As our archaeological efforts are practiced at these multiple scales, archaeology’s chances to develop consensus answers to the big comparative issues regarding societal diversity, how it came to be, and how it changes over historical time will increase.
See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Chemical Analysis Techniques; Craft Specialization; Exchange Systems; Social Inequality, Development of.
World History
