significant changes within patterns of exchange at considerable dis-
tances, which have clear economic implications:
Mycenaean Greeks maintained links–notoriously ambivalent–with Troy
and the local Black Sea routes to the Danube mouth, and also with central and
northern Italy.... These two routes (which should be envisaged as multiple-
stranded chains of contacts between many different settlements and small
polities in fairly broad corridors, based onfluctuating alliances rather than on
any imposed authority) must be reckoned as to some degree in competition
with each other, or at least as largely incompatible alternatives.... There is
a repeated pattern here which is worth making explicit.... When the centre
of gravity has been in the eastern Mediterranean, the Danube route has
been important; as the focus moves westwards the trans-Alpine routes
take over. Two crucial urban centres came to occupy nodal points where
the east–west maritime trade routes of the Mediterranean articulate with
north–south feeder routes from the interior of the continent: Rome and
Constantinople.^52Sherratt emphasized that the significance of the two nodes he identified
were articulated by continent-wide patterns. This interpretation effect-
ively reverses Finley’s proposition that relegated distance exchange to a
marginal role. It does not imply that commercial or other transactions
played a very large part in terms of overall economic activities. There is
no reason to doubt that most forms of economic endeavour were local
and related to personal subsistence. The importance of Sherratt’s model
lies in its successful integration of many separate economic entities into
an interrelated network, articulated by a minimal formula of mutually
agreed transactions. Such transactions may well have occurred on an
irregular basis. What matters is the evidence that these patterns reveal of
a continent-wide set of mutual relations, which enabled commodities
and people to travel from one end of the network to another. The most
visible and incontrovertible evidence of this traffic is amber, whose
dissemination in the Aegean area for the south-east of Europe (as in
the Adriatic for the west) is represented residually in women’s funerary
ornaments.^53 Nevertheless, amber is unlikely to have travelled as a single
high-value commodity, but was one of a range of northern exports or
commodities penetrating into southern Europe, including rare minerals
(notably Bactrian gold and Breton or Cornish tin), as well as perishable
organic materials, notably furs, exotic pelts, and manufactured items.
The disappearance of organic remains from the material record has
reduced the visibility of the traffic and the importance of the network
(^52) Sherratt 1995, 17–19.
(^53) Beck and Bouzek 1993; Kilian-Dirlmeier 2002, 73–5, 227.
28 Introduction