associated with urban living, such as the appointment of market officials;
the use of publicly approved coins, weights, and measures; the regulation
of sales in general, and the collection of taxes. Should we expect
the organization of market transactions to map directly over the kinds
of commodities exchanged? This is a more complex question, which
deserves deeper investigation. As the discussion of markets and market-
type exchange revealed in Chapter 2, and as we will see further below,
there is a variety of assumptions within the scholarly community about
the infrastructure of exchange across cultural boundaries.^32 These
assumptions are linked to ideas about the nature of socio-economic
structures on the one hand and to site classification on the other. The
socio-economic questions are concerned with the control of market-type
and non-market transactions. Were territorial powers, like the kings of
Macedon and Thrace, all-powerful in economic as in social matters?
How might these forms of authority have affected transactions and
demand at a local level? Were the kingdoms of Macedon and Thrace
more like the Persian Empire, in terms of attitudes to money and
markets, than to mainland Greece? In Chapter 2 I argued that‘royal
economies’should not be taken at face value, namely as command
mechanisms, driven mainly or simply by aspirations towards military
aggrandizement. So there is no reason to assume that any and every
transaction took place only with the express approval of the authorities.
In fact, there are strong reasons for thinking that a good deal of exchange
was unconstrained, as we saw in the case of grey-faced pottery in
Chapter 4.
The unconstrained exchange of ceramic technologies amongst a range
of locations in the north-east Aegean beginning in the mid sixth century
bc(and in some cases mid seventh or even earlier) on the one hand, and
various coastal and inland centres of the east Balkan peninsula on the
other, suggests that there were no formal restrictions on inter-cultural
exchange and that these exchanges operated rather effectively. The
production patterns observed in the early stages of this technological
process did not change significantly in thefifth and fourth centuriesbc,
when we might expect to see differences, if royal or princely decisions
really did affect what could and could not be exchanged in fundamental
ways. The general osmosis of commodities, reflected most clearly in the
widespread consumption of importedfine pottery from Corinth, Ionia,
and particularly Athens, seems therefore to have continued much as
before; but the specific legal and social forms of economic mechanisms
(^32) See in particular the discussion below about Pistiros in Thrace.
Regionalism and regional economies 207