This book, a comparative study of specialised production in prehistoric societies, examines approaches to specialization and exchange.

Through a detailed examination of the archaeological evidence and written records, this comprehensive text aims to develop a common understanding of what complexity means to archaeologists, and the methods by which they identify and analyze it. In this first new undergraduate textbook on ancient complex societies in two decades, the authors use vivid writing, textboxes on key themes and sites, and a glossary to keep students thoroughly engaged.

Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing. A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.

This archaeological study reconstructs Pre-Columbian exchange networks in the Lesser Antilles based on lithic artefact distributions among the different islands.

This volume focuses on the anthropological concept of trade as a fundamentally social activity concerned not only with the movement of goods, but also on the social context and consequences of that exchange. The distinguished contributors discuss trade on a range of scales—from a solitary confinement cell to trans-oceanic networks—in settings around the world and over the past 3000 years. They address themes such as exchange as a communicative act, the ways in which exchange transforms the relationship between people and things, the significance of agency and power in contexts of trade, and how sites of consumption and discard speak to processes of exchange. The volume merges traditional archaeological concerns about trade and exchange with more contemporary issues of agency, identity and social meaning.

This collection of articles helps to explain why the Bronze Age has come to hold such a fascination within modern archaeological research. By providing new theoretical and analytical perspectives on the evidence new interpretative avenues have opened, it situates the history of the Bronze Age in both a local and a global setting.