prestige goods as gifts determined the hierarchy, and wealth in the form of
exotic valuables validated one’s social status. Luxury goods were symbols of
personal superiority, and the wearing, display, or consumption of them dis-
tinguished the elite from the common people. The larger a leader’s capacity
for dispensing gifts, the greater his hold over those to whom he gave them
and thus the greater his power. Prestige markers distributed downward
forged loyalty; it was on them that political power was based.
Utilitarian items continued to be exchanged, but the mass of common
people reaped little immediate benefit from the metals revolution. A few
copper sickles may have been made in copper-rich areas, but bronze plows
don’t usually appear next to bronze swords in hoards or among grave goods.
As for the long-distance trade in luxury goods, its impact on the common
people was hardly positive. Rather they ended up working harder in the
fields, workshops, quarries, and mines to produce whatever was used for
exchange by the elites to further their own status.
Long-distance trade in the Bronze Age impacted not only within societies
but between them. Trade, gift exchange, and marriage links helped to
lubricate relations between elites. Exchange systems were often designed so
that elites could provide each other with the exotica needed to maintain
power within their own spheres. Exchange did not have to take place
directly between two parties. Participants were tied into a grid of exchange
that allowed a giver to receive something in return from someone in the
system that was not necessarily the direct recipient of his own gift. Rulers of
equal stature were expected to exchange gifts equivalent in value, but if one
could not match the other, he became obligated and thus inferior. A group
that had better access to some prestige item through control over raw mate-
rial could exert dominance over another group if its leaders needed the
prestige material as a means for maintaining their superiority within their
own group. But reciprocity was still the principle on which exchange was
founded. The concept of making a profit in the sense of gaining a material
surplus from an exchange was an idea whose time had not quite come.
The expansion of trade routes and the assertion of control over them by
elites, the development of trade centers as places of wealth accumulation
linking trade routes together, the formation of social hierarchies, the align-
ment of ranking among chiefs leading to paramount chiefs and ultimately
chief-of-chiefs or king, andfinally the emergence of state structures are best
seen as interactive processes. By the close of the Bronze Age, long-distance
exchange networks were in place from Italy to Sweden. Regions as peripheral
as Hungary and Denmark were able to acquire large quantities of metal from
considerable distances, transform it intofinished products recognized forfine
craftsmanship, and re-export them to other areas of considerable distance.
Europe, however, was far from being the commercial center of Afro–Eurasia.
Other, more central, places had earlier moved into more complex political
and social forms, what is roughly referred to as“civilization.”The earliest of
18 In the beginning