Some Methodological Issues of Exchange in Oceanic Prehistory

Abstract

EXCHANGE HAS EMERGED as a recurrent theme in Oceanic anthropology and prehistory.Despite long-standing interest in it, explanations are not well developed for why exchange systems originated, why they persisted or ceased, and how they operated.This is true not only for archaeologists but also for sociocultural anthropologists who have, in many cases, offered only particularistic descriptions of exchange networks.Explaining the role of exchange and interaction in the evolution of prehistoric Oceanic societies will require the solution of two problems, one technical, the other methodological.The first of these is the identification of commodities moved.Ideally, identification requires compositional characterization, which in some cases will permit determination of geologic provenance.In some instances, macroscopic characterization of stylistic features may also be used to infer the exchange goods.The second problem is less amenable to a technical fix: It involves linking patterns of exchange (deduced from distributional data) with explanatory models in island settings.We briefly examine these issues in this paper. IDENTIFICATIONArchaeologists have traditionally approached exchange as a problem with three interrelated steps (Earle 1982:3-4).These are (1) to ascribe a source to the commodities of exchange; (2) to describe the spatial patterning of the commodities; and (3) to reconstruct the organization and/or the modes of prehistoric exchange (Renfrew 1975).To accomplish the third step, some archaeologists (e.g., Hodder 1980) have attempted to use analogues from contemporary systems and to describe exchange in ways that mirror ethnographic accounts.Studies of exchange face the technical problem of developing means-through material analyses-to distinguish artifacts oflocal origin from those of exotic origin, in any particular archaeological assemblage.Much of this falls within the purview of the familiar area of research known as archaeometry, in which substantial advances have been made in recent years.

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