Prehistori Exchange Systems in North America.

Feinman, Gary M.

This book is the second of two volumes edited by Timothy G. Baugh & Jonathon E. Ericson that examine patterns of exchange in ancient North America. As was the case with the earlier collection, The American Southwest and Mesoamerica: systems of prehistoric exchange (1993), this publication stems from a symposium that was held at the 1986 (Toronto) meetings of the Society for American Archaeology. The two volumes were divided geographically, with the earlier collection focused on Middle America and the Southwest. This compendium, which includes a dozen, regionally focused chapters (supplemented with an introductory section by the editors and a synthetic concluding essay by Timothy K. Earle), covers the remainder of the continent.

In this collection, prehistoric patterns of exchange are diachronically summarized for seven eastern and five western North American regions. The former segments are composed of the Maritime Peninsula (Bourque), the St Lawrence River Basin (Wright), the Middle Atlantic (Stewart), the Southeast (Johnson), the Midwest (Brose), and two chapters on the Lower Mississippi Valley (Gibson, Lafferty). Western coverage includes the Plains (Vehik and Baugh), the Northwestern Interior Plateau (Galm), British Columbia (Carlson), California (Jackson and Ericson), and a chapter on Great Basin-California exchange (Hughes). The thoroughness of each review is a strength of the volume. Information from the 'grey literature' of contract archaeology is consistently incorporated, providing a valuable service for those who conduct research outside the component regions. These chapters are rich in descriptive summaries of what was exchanged, how the volume of traded goods shifted over time, and often where the commodities were obtained. Yet, for all their empirical depth, many of the regional chapters adopt a largely inductive approach that offers little explicit direction as to why the documented shifts in the patterns of exchange occurred or how the specific movement of goods in the component areas might inform broader models of (or more general debates concerning) exchange.

Principal synthesis for the volume is handled in Earle's concluding chapter, where several important themes and observations that cross-cut the collection are noted. Throughout the regions, the movement of exotic goods is basically ubiquitous, although the nature, volume and directionality of the circulated items varies over time. Several authors (Johnson, Gibson, Brose, Hughes) emphasize the episodic nature of exchange patterns; there is no clear progressive or regular temporal increase in trade volumes over time. The repeated importance of desirable stone in these inter-regional interactions cannot be over stressed, while Earle (p. 424) observes that the use of this good trends temporally from largely technological (e.g. points, knives) to somewhat more prestige-related or ornamental goods (e.g. beads). Shell, native metal, and animal teeth and skins (all raw resources that were modified for ornamental use) are other repeatedly described exchange goods, while food items and highly crafted artefacts that were heavily laden with symbolic representations are rarely mentioned (with the exception of the Mississippian period in the east).

Another common pattern in many of the discussed regions is the greater abundance of exotic ornaments in burial as opposed to domestic contexts (Bourque, Wright, Stewart, Brose, Galm, Carlson, Jackson and Ericson). Frequently, the distribution of these grave goods is highly unequal from one burial to another. Drawing on the works of Richard Bradley, Earle (p. 431) interprets these elaborate mortuary displays as status related, but linked as closely to the direct lineal transition of social position from the dead to their living descendants as to the departed alone. The establishment of these inter-generational personal connections seems to be a recurrent, important, and often rather ancient concern in many of the areas discussed.

The repeated emphasis on exotic adornment, burial wealth, and networks of long-distance ties belies the importance of prestige-good exchange or what Earle terms 'wealth-finance' (as opposed to 'staple-finance' or the intensive production of food staples), as a basis for social differentiation. Interestingly, none of these regional examples (again with the exception of Middle Mississippian) have much evidence for large ceremonial or corporate public spaces or central storage facilities. The ephemeral nature of many of the exchange links may reflect their basis in specific influential traders or leaders, whose networks of partners shifted with the life cycles of the particular participants. At the same time, the political and economic importance of those ties for specific populations may help to account for the burial displays through which linear kin endeavoured to inherit the personal networks (as well as the status) of their ancestors. In many of the regions that are included in this volume, these socio-economic patterns appear to have been in place from the Archaic period onwards.

A somewhat different organizational pattern is evident for the Middle Mississippian, although prestige goods were important there as well. Mississippian exchange items include ceremonial objects (e.g. stylized masks, drinking containers, stone mace heads) that radiate the symbols of mythic and corporate power (Brose p. 231). More corporate ritual patterns are also evident in monumental central mound groups and plazas so typical of Mississippian sites, like Cahokia. At the same time, the political economy emphasized agricultural production, storage, and possibly redistribution to a degree unrecognized by other authors in this collection.

In part, these organizational differences may reflect the larger scale and greater complexity of Mississippian societies, where leaders may have had more diverse bases of power. Yet is that all that there is to it? I would suggest not, if allowed to refer back to a North American region (the Puebloan Southwest) segregated into the earlier Ericson-Baugh volume. Most scholars would agree that many, if not most, Puebloan societies were more similar in hierarchical complexity and societal scale to the non-Mississippian cases in this collection. But one finds less emphasis on ostentatious burial wealth or elaborate personal ornamentation, and greater attention to corporate ritual space, large-scale staple storage, intensive agricultural production, and collective construction at monumental scales. Like Middle Mississippian societies, the ancient Pueblos of the Southwest seem somewhat more 'corporate' than 'network' in organizational orientation.

In the interest of synthesis, this review has strayed a bit from the empirical 'meat and potatoes' of this edited collection. Nevertheless, this tack is decidedly not meant to undervalue the comprehensive chapters or the editors' dedicated efforts to bring them together. Rather, I suspect it will be a harbinger of a string of future efforts that will rely heavily on this collection (and its companion volume) for systematic and comparative examinations of ancient North America and the nature of the links between the various societies that composed it.

GARY M. FEINMAN Department of Anthropology University of Wisconsin-Madison

Reference

BAUGH, T.G. & J.E. ERICSON. 1993. The American Southwest and Mesoamerica: systems of prehistoric exchange. New York (NY): Plenum Press.