The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange

Undergraduate

This seminar will focus on archaeological approaches to exchange and trade. As background, we will review some of the principal theories of exchange from anthropology and sociology, such as those of Mauss, Malinowski and Polanyi. The role of trade and exchange in different kinds of societies will examined by contextualizing these transactions within specific cultural configurations and considering the nature of production and consumption as they relate to movement of these goods. We will consider methods and models that have been used to analyze regions of interaction at different spatial scales and the theoretical arguments about the social impact of inter-regional and intra-regional interactions involving the transfer of goods, including approaches such as world systems, unequal development and globalization. In addition, we will examine the ways that have been utilized in archaeology to identify different kinds of exchange systems, often through analogies to well documented ethnographic and historic cases. Finally, we will consider the range of techniques that have been employed in order to track the movement of goods across space. These sourcing techniques will be evaluated in terms of their advantages and disadvantages from an archaeological perspective, and how the best technical analyses may vary according to the nature of natural or cultural materials under consideration (ceramics, volcanic stone, metals, etc.). The theme for this year’s seminar is obsidian so students should select some aspect of obsidian research for their final paper and presentation. W 11:35am-12:50pm