Diagnostics of low-impact foreign intrusions … would include the presence of significant quantities of all defined categories of artifacts, architecture, and iconography. Artifacts, both foreign imports and locally made copies, as well as foreign symbols rendered in a local style should be found in elite and non-elite contexts.

Linking political economy and ritual economy perspectives focuses our attention to the articulation of aristocratic behavior and social hierarchies in chiefly and transegalitarian societies. The emergence, legitimation, and maintenance of aristocracy, heterarchy, and hierarchy is often linked to the widespread circulation, deployment, production, and use of alienable and inalienable goods (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Earle 1997, 2002; Hayden 1998, 2001, 2011; Mills 2004; Agbe-Davies and Bauer 2010), but while such items may be restricted, they may also be appropriated by rivals and non-elite aggrandizers are threatened. Social institutions based on an emergent political and ritual economy typically involve complex interactions of labor intensification, ritual structures, surplus mobilization, and control over the distribution of highly valued and often exotic goods. Inalienable goods become increasingly restricted as elite aggrandizers institutionalize their authority and exert limitations over exchange nodes and spheres of influence (Earle 2002: 39).

Megalith construction is invariably associated with complex exchange networks, and this is undoubtedly the case with Stonehenge (Figure 3.1), built and rebuilt in five stages over a period of c. 1,300 years during the transition from stone to bronze (Darvill et al. 2012). Ethnographies living traditions of megalith building, such as in southern Madagascar, reveal exchanges between wife-giving and wife-taking lineages, between women of different lineages and clans, between quarry-workers and tomb-builders and between hosts and mobilized labour (Parker Pearson 2002, 2010). One of the major exchanges in such societies is that of labour for hospitality and for the blessing of the ancestors (Layard 1942; Hoskins 1986; Adams 2016). Hosts exchange wealth for honour and renown, both for the living and for the dead. In many cases, the exchanges are obligatory rather than voluntary, to satisfy those in power and to appease the supernatural.

A notable feature of the European Bronze Age is that many regions were able to establish successful metalworking traditions based partly or entirely on imported metal supplies. Geological controls on the distribution of metal resources, together with various technological constraints and limited sharing of mining and metallurgical expertise, meant that some areas emerged as strong producers of primary metal, while others relied on trade for their needs. The exchange of metal, through whatever agency, created economic dependency and was an important channel for the spread of other cultural influences. Control of metal circulation by individuals or groups for their own benefit had important implications in terms of economic power and the political control exercised by these emerging elites.

At the arrival of Columbus to the Americas, the Spanish concentrated their colonial enterprise in the Caribbean. Here they encountered some groups that showed strong social differentiation but without the presence of a state bureaucracy. It is for this reason that the ancient Caribbean has been considered since early on by anthropology and archaeology as an ideal place for the study of non-state, stratified societies (e.g., Fewkes 1907; Mason 1941). For example, recognizing the stratification among these groups and, yet, the absence of the institution of the state, Steward (1948) classified them as the Circum-Caribbean Tribes, eventually becoming an intermediate stage in his evolutionary scale between the egalitarian and traditional Tropical Forest Tribes and the Andean civilizations. The description of this category is very similar to today’s concept of chiefdom developed decades later by Service (1962), a former student of Steward. In 1955, Oberg also used the Caribbean as an example of a category in his classification system that he called Political Organized Chiefdoms, the first time the term chiefdom was formally defined in anthropology. The interest on the Caribbean waned in anthropological archaeology in the 1960s with the advent of the New Archaeology that favored focusing on the study of stratified societies on the so-called core areas such as Mesoamerica and the Andes.

Civilization is often considered to be the culture of state societies, in which urbanism, specialized market exchanges, foreign trade, and traders developed to support large-scale political societies with social stratification, wealth inequalities, and high arts (Childe 1952). The present volume, Trade before Civilizations, as well as the Gothenburg University conference on which it is based, consider the social and political dynamics associated with distant trading as it existed before states, and we have been asked to be discussants and now commentators. Our common research agenda has focused on how political economies underlay the formation of centralized power and social inequality. for both of our lifetimes, we have studied the evolution of intermediate-scaled societies that emerged both before state formation and beyond the domination of states. These societies represent varying political scales and centrality that we have glossed as “trans-egalitarian” and “chiefly” (Earle 1987, 1997; Hayden 1995, 2001a, 2014). In prehistory and history, such societies existed around the world without states and on the periphery of states. The elaboration and significance of trade (long-distance exchange) in these societies involved trans-regional movements of prestige goods (wealth) and people. Such objects carried meaning that structured social relationships in terms of status, roles, values, and authority. To understand wealth-based trade helps us to understand the nature of how social complexity emerged and operated.

Scholarly interest in the emergence of social complexity is often intertwined with inquiries into reciprocity and trade. The stage was set for this research focus in the mid to late twentieth century with advances in dating techniques, new methods for tracing the origins of certain widely traded materials, improved ways of assessing food-consumption patterns and season of site occupation, multiscalar settlement studies, discussions about the applicability of various economic models, and debates between cultural evolutionists and those who embraced various strands of Marxism.

How an ancient object, artefact or commodity has moved over vast distances from one region to another, crossed major seas or travelled by land over extensive territories, has occupied and intrigued scholars in many disciplines over the years (Sabloff and Lamberg-Karlovsky 1975; Kristiansen et al. 2018). This subject becomes even more intriguing knowing that no textual evidence can give us a hint or a glimpse how this was organized. Since the beginning of modern humans in the Palaeolithic, migration and mobility have driven demographic expansion and the movement of material culture. At the same time, social interaction and intermarriage between groups constituted a basic institutional pattern among modern humans to prevent inbreeding, as demonstrated by ancient DNA (Sikora et al. 2017). New genetic evidence provides insights into patterns of human mobility and genetic admixture. However, the onset of trade and exchange as an institutionalized activity is still not well understood. The challenge increases once we move back in time before any written sources can inform us. How did pre-modern/pre-state societies organize themselves to engage in long-distance exchange? How did such societies communicate? How did such societies foster conditions and/or social institutions that facilitated long-distance exchange? Can the rise of social complexity be connected to long-distance exchange? Exactly how far did traders, raiders and visitors travel in prehistory and how were there distant exchanges organized? All of these questions can be boiled down to two basic questions: when and under what circumstances did trade become institutionalized in pre-state societies, and what forms did such institutionalization take?