Market Development within the Context of Household Exchange and Community Organization

The goal of this research project is to understand the role of political fragmentation and competition in long-term market development. Previous research tracking market trajectories over multiple centuries has identified local factors driving commercialization of everyday items: political shifts to smaller regional powers, development of a common symbol set, and new long-distance exchange networks.

Archaeology is essential to providing new paradigms of market development trajectories. Only archaeological data can directly measure economic activities over long time spans at the scale of individual households to identify both continuities and breaks in household participation in markets. Under what initial conditions does political fragmentation support economic expansion or perhaps trigger the reverse, and result in economic downturns?

Identifying key variables and dependent pathways that undergird durable regional economic development is relevant to modern economies in many regions. Individual household experiences provide crucial insights as the key producing and consuming units to consider the variables driving or inhibiting economic development within smaller communities. This research generates new capabilities for research partnerships through the creation of data infrastructure and produces both a digital and physical repository, including a database platform deployed as a public resource.

Student training and research is a key outcome of the project with university students working collaboratively to create a research hub.

Understanding long-term economic trajectories and the impetus for market development requires both time depth and comparable producing and consuming units. This project obtains household inventories that fit that steep analytical requirement and contribute large samples collected under close to identical conditions to compare data from two distinctive eras during political transition in the same region.

The project provides detailed empirical evidence about how exchange modalities and long-distance networks articulated with shifts in political organization and economic conditions in an area of the world where market exchange developed independently. Researchers bring expertise in database informatics to digitize field and lab results in combination with information drawn from publications and salvage reports into a publicly available, all-inclusive database.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.