any question that the Melian trade was not profit-driven. Obsidian was being
hauled off the island before anyone lived there and, after settlers did arrive,
they did not live near the quarries and apparently made no attempt to
establish a monopoly over them. Much obsidian was obtained by passersby–
initially tunafishermen and later merchant sailors transporting other goods
such as metals and pottery, who stopped to collect it for ballast. When the
transporters reached their ultimate destination, the obsidian was distributed
down-the-line, accruing no real cost of transportation. Obsidian was also
obtained from Melos by special-purpose trips made by knappers in the
employ of the great Bronze Age palaces of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean
Greece. In both instances, obtaining obsidian was a self-serve, cash-and-carry
operation without the cash.
The Bronze Age did not bring an end to obsidian’s popularity since few
early tools were made of copper or bronze. The use of iron, however, spelled
the decline of obsidian as a major item of trade although it continued to be
used for ornamental objects such as statuettes and for decorative purposes in
mosaics. The Egyptians made small elegant tables of it. The large-scale trade
in amber came after that of obsidian and differed in significant ways. It was
not used in bulk, was not utilitarian in function, and would oxidize and
disintegrate under adverse conditions. Amber occurs naturally in various
parts of the world and was often found in the soil, in beds of lignite, along
sea and lake shores, and in coastal depressions. A few places around the
Mediterranean, in particular Sicily, contained deposits, but the major source
of European amber was around the Baltic Sea in a belt stretching from
Britain to the Ukraine. The origin of this enormous deposit was a primeval
forest that once existed in Finland but was eventually spread by glacial and
water action to its present extent. All of the amber used in Neolithic and
Bronze Age trade came from the Baltic amber belt.
During most of the Neolithic period, the use of amber was confined to its
source area. It was gathered as nodules and taken to sites, a major one being
in Latvia, where the raw material was worked intofinished products such as
beads and buttons. This began to change in the late Neolithic as amber
spread in small quantities into Central Europe, but the trade came into its
own in the Bronze Age, expanding south and west. The principal use was for
ornaments, especially necklaces and pendants often deposited as grave goods,
but amber workers also became more creative, turning out statuettes, reliefs,
and incised plaques. While the possession of an obsidian knife may have
brought status to an individual in an egalitarian society during the
Neolithic, amber became part of the Bronze Age prestige exchange system
that accompanied the development of hierarchies and the social stratification
process. It was a product elites competed for; in one royal Mycenaean Greek
shaft grave alone, 1,200 amber beads were found.
Amber became a major item of trade in the Bronze Age because places
such as Denmark and other areas of northern Europe needed metals that were
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