Trade without citadels? Investigating space-time compression the Bronze Age cities of the Indus...
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2023-04-03

Toby Wilkinson (Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology), Nancy Highcock 
(British Museum), Adam S. Green (University of York), & Darryl Wilkinson 
(Dartmouth College)

Archaeologists have often shaped evidence from the world’s first cities to fit their particular 
theories concerning urban development and institutions. Childe’s views on the role of longdistance exchange in his theory of urban revolution is a case in point. However, though he 
placed primacy on the rise of elites and their supposed control of agrarian surpluses, he also 
sought to fit the evidence for trade produced by the major urban excavations of his day in which 
the first cities “already included industrial materials,” making them “dependent for vital 
materials on long distance trade as no neolithic village ever was” (Childe, 1950:16). Today, 
mounting research on the first cities not only challenges Childe’s narrative about the inevitable 
rise of elites in the Bronze Age, but the last 40 years of new evidence for long and mediumdistance trade has also generated new perspectives on its role in Bronze Age space-time 
compression. In this paper, we seek to account for the ways in which trade and its associated 
technologies impacted urban communities by comparing emerging datasets from the Indus 
civilisation and Mesopotamia. What role did traded materials actually play in the Bronze Age 
economies of the world’s first cities? Who benefited from long-distance exchange, and what 
effects did those benefits have on social relations? Who was left behind? And to what extent 
were the changes created by the agency of elites or of the invisible hands of markets, “culture” 
and environment? At stake in resolving these mechanisms is our ability both to make sense of 
the past, and to prepare for political possibilities for the future.