Early Bronze Age Goods Exchange in the Southern Levant: A Marxist Perspective

Early Bronze Age Goods Exchange in the Southern Levant provides an overview of all the commodities of the Early Bronze Age of the Southern Levant for which we know their sources and distribution. But this is not just a survey or a simple list of finds. Included are methodological discussions of several topics which make original contributions regarding the interpretation of production centres and the way the goods arrived to the distribution points. The most original contribution of this volume is in the entire interpretation and theoretical framework it provides regarding the exchange of commodities in a precapitalistic society; that is, utilizing mainly the methods of the critique to the political economy (Marxism), ethnoarchaeology and economic anthropology. The volume emphasizes the internal economic developments in the early history of the Southern Levant that can be studied using archaeological sources in the framework of modern theories of human development. It is a kind of work on economic history with non-written sources, although it uses historical written sources from neighboring cultures and late documents from our region to compare and derive conclusions.