In this book, Sarah Murray provides a comprehensive treatment of textual and archaeological evidence for the long-distance trade economy of Greece across 600 years during the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. Analyzing the finished objects that sustained this kind of trade, she also situates these artifacts within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean economy, including evidence for the import and export of commodities as well as demographic change. Murray argues that our current model of exchange during the Late Bronze Age is in need of a thoroughgoing reformulation. She demonstrates that the association of imported objects with elite self-fashioning is not supported by the evidence from any period in early Greek history. Moreover, the notional 'decline' in trade during Greece's purported Dark Age appears to be the result of severe economic contraction, rather than a severance of access to trade routes.

An undulating flow of multi-scalar exchanges pulsed across the surface of Aegean from the beginnings of the Bronze Age in the third millennium to the transition into the Iron Age nearly two thousand years later. Such exchanges were variable in nature. Most probably occurred within a rather circumscribed environment, involving neighboring communities operating across the many real but traversable geographical boundaries that characterize the Aegean landscape – ridges separating mountain plateaus, rocky coastal stretches between bays, or narrow straits amidst archipelagos. This Element is focused on the less-frequent but important long-distance exchanges that connected people in the Aegean with the wider Mediterranean and European world, especially focusing on interactions that may be classified as 'economic'. After reviewing basic definitions and discussing some methods and materials available for studying long-distance exchange, this Element presents a diachronic assessment of the geospatial, scalar, and structural characteristics of long-distance exchange and inter-regional economies.

Naked Male Figurines in the EIA Aegean -- Iconographic and Regional Patterns in EIA Bronze Figurines and the History of Ritual Action -- The Lost Wax Method of Production and EIA Bronze Figurines -- Bronze Figurines, Transformative Processes, and Ritual Power -- EIA Nudity and Ritual in Historical Perspective -- Method and Approach in the Archaeology of the EIA Aegean.

This dissertation engages in the current debate on whether there was more continuity or more discontinuity in Greece after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces by investigating the evidence for changes in international trade and exchange between 1300 and 900 B.C.E. While most assessments of trade in the Greek Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age have relied on impressionistic accounts based on bits and pieces of the evidence, I present a precise accounting of the material evidence for trade from before and after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. For the first time, my dissertation provides quantitative documentation that the number of imports in Greece declined by about half after the end of the Late Bronze Age, and that the number of imports reached a nadir precisely in what is traditionally thought to have been the darkest part of the Dark Age (the 11th century). However, I also demonstrate that the number of known imports in Greece tracks very closely with trends in population and evidence for complexity of productive systems. This covariance between import quantities, population, and economic complexity suggests that the decline in the number of imports, usually seen as evidence for the isolation of Greece during the Early Iron Age, is rather more likely to have been an epiphenomenon of an overall decline in population and economic complexity that occurred in the Early Iron Age. In addition to assessing import quantities, I produce a close reading of the imported artifacts themselves. I show that the nature of the objects that Greeks were importing changed dramatically after the Mycenaean collapse. Late Bronze Age trade goods consisted primarily of bulk materials, such as metals and foodstuffs, or administrative objects, such as seals. In the Early Iron Age, however, imported objects consisted mostly of prestige items meant for personal adornment or individual enrichment, such as metal vessels or pieces of glass jewelry. The changes observed in the archaeological evidence fit well with the textual evidence. While Linear B texts from Mycenaean Greece suggest that commodities were of great interest to the palatial states, characters in the Homeric poems, thought to give us some sense of Dark Age social systems, trade fancy metal vessels and other fine finished goods amongst themselves. Taken together, the evidence in my dissertation shows that Greece was not particularly isolated during the Early Iron Age, but that trade and the economy changed in a variety of thoroughgoing ways over the period from 1300 to 900 BCE. For Greek history, there are two major implications. First, the economic developments I observe are likely to be related to deep and broad changes in social and political realities, suggesting that historical Greece has its structural roots in the Early Iron Age rather than in the Mycenaean states of the Late Bronze Age. Second, the argument that Greek intellectual history (e.g. the invention of democracy) arose in a vacuum in the Early Iron Age is no longer tenable, since the evidence does not support a view in which Greece was ever totally cut off from the rest of the Mediterranean.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of change in long-distance exchange systems during the collapse of Mycenaean Greece