slave labour needs to be integrated with free labourers into a broader set
of costs and prices, since that is how slaves appear in contracts and other
documents relating to specific projects.^49 So a more balanced or a more
coherent evaluation of ancient economies would require an integrated
approach, one that unites different kinds of social interaction, including
economic exchanges.
Is such an attempt doable? After all, surviving data is uneven and
fragmentary, and we still lack convincing, widely agreed methods of
interpreting the data. Modelling at least provides ways of assessing
whether a particular approach makes sense.^50 The outline of an inte-
grated model, one that unites social practices as well as forms of con-
sumption and exchange, has been presented in a series of diagrams by
John Davies for the city of Athens during thefifth to fourth centuriesbc,
in the form offlows of resources within a topological space.^51 As the
author readily admits, this model is a simplified scheme, which is
intended to make the components clear and comprehensible. Any ser-
ious attempt to understand diachronic patterns of exchange requires a
far greater integration of the different elements that played a part within
the economy of any single community than has ever been attempted by
historians of economies, recent or ancient. Davies’model does not try to
specify precise chronological boundaries, but rather to characterize the
distinctive features of a known historical community over an extended
time period of several centuries. Since we lack, for the world of classical
antiquity, the kinds of accounting statistics that are considered to pro-
vide good enough economic snapshots for contemporary economies, a
long view can provide important insights that are not particularly visible
within shorter time scales.
Some of the most valuable insights about long-term historical pro-
cesses in the remote history of the Balkan region have emerged in the
work of a prehistorian, Andrew Sherratt, a research student of one of the
greatest analytical archaeologists, David Clarke, but an admirer of
Gordon Childe. Sherratt consciously aimed to combine Clarke’s analy-
tical rigour with Childe’s large-scale cultural conceptualizations. In con-
trast to the majority of scholars, who confined their research to particular
sub-regions within the continent of Europe, Sherratt was interested in
broad inter- and intra-regional phenomena, as well as localized ones. By
enlarging the canvas under investigation, Sherratt was able to detect
(^49) See now Feyel 2006, 331, 339–40, 395–438, 442–64, 509–10.
(^50) Epstein 2008.
(^51) Davies 2005, 142–54, withfigures 6.8–6.10, 6.12–6.14.
Introduction 27