Long-Distance Exchange and Inter-Regional Economies

This Element examines the undulating flows of exchange that shaped Bronze Age Aegean culture during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE.

This Element is focused on the 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'.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.