and deposited as votive offerings, sometimes show considerable wear, indi-
cating that at one time they were employed for practical use but later
became ceremonial objects. Periodic meetings were no longer the principal
venue for exchange; now groups were linked in chains, each link having
access to some resource the others desired.
Commercial trade in a marketplace setting, where strangers were engaged
in profit-driven entrepreneurial behavior, was as dangerous in the Neolithic
as groups bumping into each other were in the Paleolithic. Dealing with
people from different places with whom one did not have formal ties
required assurances of security, which in the early Neolithic was usually not
available. Goods generally moved in a linear fashion in what is referred to as
a down-the-line system or percolated through one community to another in a
trickle trade system so that, when traced, they decrease in proportion to the
distance from their source. Items traveled farther than people so that no one
had to move beyond his own territory.
In the later Neolithic, distribution patterns show signs of change. Most
exchange was still between people who knew each other and was based on
reciprocity although some transactions may have included elements of com-
mercial trade such as bargaining. Likewise most goods continued to be sent
down-the-line and often circulated over a period of generations but over
increasingly larger areas. Some goods were also beginning to be sent direc-
tionally, that is, direct from their source to a specific location bypassing
areas in between. Shells from the Indian Ocean have turned up infifth-
millennium BCESyria, almost 1,000 miles away. As Neolithic economies
allowed for steady population rise, more people fueled a demand for more
goods. Larger, more stable communities attracted people with something to
swap. Between 6250 and 5400BCE, the largest of these communities was
Catal Huyuk in south central Anatolia. At its height Catal Huyuk may have
had a population of 4,000–6,000, making it the largest known settlement in
the world at the time. Its inhabitants grew wheat and barley and traded
cattle, which had the great advantage of transporting itself. They also traded
obsidian from a nearby source, for which there was a great demand elsewhere.
The ruins of Catal Huyuk contain an extraordinary quantity of imported
material featuring shells from the Mediterranean and different kinds of exotic
stones.
Around the Mediterranean long-distance trade did not wait for the rise of
cities and states. People in boats were coast hugging from shore to island and
island to island carrying and exchanging goods. This varied in scale from
fishermen who did part-time trading to peddlers who stopped at villages
along the coast to see what the locals had to offer. Many Neolithic sites were
located near natural deposits of desirable stone. Cores and preforms, which
had been roughed out or undergone some preliminary shaping and would be
made into products elsewhere, as well asfinished products such as blades,
were sent out. Some settlements were composed of specialized craftsmen who
In the beginning 15