Accounting for the prehistoric long‐distance movement of goods with a measure of style

Abstract

A sharing of stylistic attributes is taken to be a measure of social and political relationships. By calculating a coefficient of stylistic association between peoples of distant regions, a crude but useful indicator of the temper of sociopolitical relationships is derived which can help account for otherwise puzzling changes in the long‐distance interchange of economically valuable goods. In a trial application of this analytical procedure, attributes of ceramic style were used to estimate the strength of relationships between the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec and four neighboring regions of pre‐Columbian Mesoamerica. The results provided an explanation for variations in the non‐local sources and quantities of obsidian procured by the inhabitants of the southern Isthmus over a 1500‐year span of time.

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