“There is also a great deficiency of a circulating medium. I have seen a man bringing on his back a bag of charcoal with which to buy some trifle and another a plank to exchange for a bottle of wine. Hence every tradesman must also be a merchant and again sell the goods which he takes in exchange” – The Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin 1989 [1839], p. 219).
Abstract
While archaeologists now have demonstrated that barter and trade of material commodities began in prehistory, theoretical efforts to explain these findings are just beginning. We adapt the central place foraging model from behavioral ecology and the missing-market model from development economics to investigate conditions favoring the origins of household-level production for barter and trade in premodern economies. Interhousehold exchange is constrained by production, travel and transportation, and transaction costs; however, we predict that barter and trade become more likely as the number and effect of the following factors grow in importance: (1) local environmental heterogeneity differentiates households by production advantages; (2) preexisting social mechanisms minimize transaction costs; (3) commodities have low demand elasticity; (4) family size, gender role differentiation, or seasonal restrictions on household production lessen opportunity costs to participate in exchange; (5) travel and transportation costs are low; and (6) exchange opportunities entail commodities that also can function as money. Population density is not a direct cause of exchange but is implicated inasmuch as most of the factors we identify as causal at the household level become more salient as population density increases. We review archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence for premodern marketing, observing that the model assumptions, variables, and predictions generally receive preliminary support. Overall, we argue that case study and comparative investigation of the origins of marketing will benefit from explicit modeling within the framework of evolutionary anthropology.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Susan Glover Klemetti for her input on the original concept behind these models. Also, special thanks to David Nolin for sharing his extensive experience in Lamalera, Indonesia, with a real-world exchange system similar to these models. Nick and Sheryl were enthusiastic supporters over the several years this project deflected our attentions. We appreciate and did our best to make faithful use of the comments of Kenneth Hirth, Barry Isaac, Enrique Mayer-Behrendt, Anna Prentiss, Kristin Snopkowski, Charles Stanish, Pei-Lin Yu, David Zeanah, and John Ziker on earlier drafts, as well as the conscientious input of the five anonymous referees.
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Demps, K., Winterhalder, B. “Every Tradesman Must Also Be a Merchant”: Behavioral Ecology and Household-Level Production for Barter and Trade in Premodern Economies. J Archaeol Res 27, 49–90 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-9118-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-018-9118-6