Gift and Commodity in Archaic GreeceAuthor(s): Ian MorrisSource: Man, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 1-17Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2802643 .Accessed: 24/05/2011 02:26

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GIFT AND COMMODITY IN ARCHAIC GREECE

IAN MORRIS

University of Cambridge

The roles of the gift and the commodity in Greece c. 800-500 B.C. are analysed from the primary literary sources, and it is suggested that current anthropological models of the inter- relationships of forms of production, exchange and social organisation are too simplistic. Historical evidence can be used to supplement the ethnographic record, and to show the great importance gift exchange can have in state and even imperial civilisations. Further, the great importance of the gift in Archaic Greece was not unusual in early Europe. It is argued that the archaeologist can attempt to identify spheres of exchange and a gift economy in the material record of the deliberate consumption of wealth in prehistory.

Over the last sixty years, the study of gift exchange has been one of the central fields of research in economic anthropology. Ethnographically based models of gift exchange, particularly the evolutionary schemes of related forms of ex- change, technology, production and social organisation developed by Mauss, Sahlins and most recently Gregory, have had a profound impact in the related disciplines of history and archaeology. In this article, I will argue that historians in particular are in a position to repay some of the gifts they have received from anthropologists, by providing evidence from case studies which might lead to a modification of these widely used models. Historical data can illuminate the roles of the gift and the commodity in social formations no longer available for anthropological or sociological study, and can show changes through time in the relative positions and importance of the two exchange forms.

In this article, I will concentrate on the specific case of Archaic Greece, in the eighth to sixth centuries B.C., arguing that the dominant ethnographically derived models of the social correlates of the gift economy are over-simplified: in particular, that the anthropologists' position that gift exchange is a dominant feature in 'clan' societies alone is of dubious value. A range of ancient literary evidence will be considered which, I will argue, indicates that the relative positions and importance of the gift and commodity as forms of exchange do vary within class and state societies, but that there is no reason to suggest that the gift can be a primary mechanism only in kinship-based, non-state societies. 1

A number of anthropologists have argued that a closer rapport between anthropology and history is necessary (e.g. Godelier 1977a: 25-9; Lewis I968; Copans & Seddon 1978), and some have even made use of evidence from ancient Greece (Goody 1976: 71-2; Godelier 1977b). Too few ancient historians, however, have tried to generalise from their particular fields to contribute to models of wider relevance to anthropologists and archaeologists (cf. Godelier 1977b: I s).

Man (N.S.) 21, 1-17

2 IAN MORRIS

Anthropological models of gift exchange have been widely employed in the interpretation of the archaeological record of the complex societies of the European Later Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, often roughly contemporary with the Greek material discussed here (e. g. Kromer 1982; Champion et al. 1984: 292-5), even though the very models used would exclude the possibility of gift exchange playing a major role in such complex, hierarchical societies. The position adopted in this article is that more useful models can be constructed by the inclusion of historical evidence, showing the possible relevance of theories of the gift to a wider range of social and economic formations.

This framework suggests the significance of gift exchange for the study of complex prehistoric societies, and in the final part of this article I will discuss how the archaeologist might seek to identify the presence of gift exchange in the material record. Gift exchange is itself of course an ephemeral phenomenon, archaeologically invisible, for most social contexts of prestation produce no archaeological residue. The only contact the archaeologist can hope for with the circulation of gifts is through the activity of deliberate disposal or destruction of wealth. I will argue that it may be possible to identify one of the characteristic features of the gift economy-the existence of restricted 'spheres of exchange' -in the archaeological record, and will illustrate this with evidence from Early Iron Age Greece (c. I000-500 B.C.).

Gifts and commodities Any discussion of gifts and commodities must start with Marx. For him, the commodity was an alienable object exchanged between two transactors in a state of mutual independence (Marx 1976 [I867]: 178): to a large extent its exchange use was seen by Marx as definitional. Its appearance was treated as a consequence of the rise of private property. This was because of his view that there was no exchange other than through the commodity; he held that in primitive, Asiatic and Classical modes of production the commodity existed primarily in the interstices of communities (1976: 172), and in primitive societies there was no exchange within the community (1976: I82). Marx's position on this seems naive in the light of modern anthropological research (see Firth 1975: 37; Gregory 1982: 12; Bloch 1983: 63-94), but his concept of the commodity nevertheless forms the indispensable background against which to study the gift.

The theory of the gift has owed most to Mauss (1954 [1925]) and Levi-Strauss (I969 [1949]): an inalienable thing or person exchanged between two recipro- cally dependent transactors.2 The aim of the gift economy is accumulation for de-accumulation; the gift economy is above all a debt-economy, where the actors strive to maximise outgoings (see Gregory I980; 1982; 1984). The system can be described as one of 'alternating disequilibrium', where the aim is never to have debts 'paid off', but to preserve a situation of personal indebtedness. Mauss placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale, from total prestation through gift economy to commodity exchange (1954: 9I, n. 68), and both Sahlins (1974: I86-7) and Gregory (1982: I9) have followed in this, distin-

IAN MORRIS 3

guishing between the clan society, where the gift predominates, and the class society, where private property and the commodity are the norm. Gregory elaborates this simple bipolar opposition into a continuum of related forms of technology, distribution and exchange (1984: 17), of which he writes3

At one end of the continuum there is the moiety or dual-clan system of organisation, at the other end the proletarian or capitalist system of organisation. As one moves from one extreme to the other, equality and unity give way to inequality and separation (Gregory I982: 37).

Gregory has been at pains to point out that his approach provides a logical history rather than a carefully constructed and tested evolutionary model for the prehistorian, and that much study will be necessary before its validity can be assumed (1984: I9). Nevertheless, the potential of Gregory's model for the prehistorian is immediately obvious, and his approach has already been applied in the study of consumption in the complex societies of the European Bronze Age (Bradley 1982; 1984: 96-I06). In the next section, I will ask how useful the clan:class::gift: commodity formula is, assessing its validity in the light of the earliest literary sources from the Greek world.

Gift exchange in Archaic Greece To the historian of ancient Greece, Gregory's spectrum of exchange forms is disturbingly reminiscent of the fruitless primitivist/modernist debate of the 1930's. In 1928,Johannes Hasebroek published his book Staat und Handel im alten Griechenland (English translation 1933), arguing that the economy in ancient Greece had to be studied in the context of its links with the political life of the Greek city state. He pointed out that capitalist concepts could not be applied directly to the Greek economy; there was no national economy in the Greek state, and the only 'political' interest in 'economic' problems was to insure a steady flow of life-giving necessities, where these could not be obtained locally. The citizens were important in their role as consumers, not producers, and industrial and commercial activity was almost totally dominated by free resident aliens (metics) and slaves.

This important work unfortunately only served to renew an old controversy as to whether the Greek economy was a 'primitive' domestic mode of produc- tion, or a 'modern' mercantile system. The primitivists, following the tradition of Rodbertus and Buicher, held that Hasebroek's position was sound, but that he exaggerated the unimportance of trade in the economy; while the 'modernists' stressed the gaps in Hasebroek's knowledge and his excessive schematisation. The modernists traced their position mainly from the late nineteenth century writings of the great German historian Eduard Meyer, but their argument is best known in the English speaking world from A. W. Gomme's reply to Hasebroek (Gomme 1937: 42-66), stigmatised by Moses Finley as 'a schoolboy version of Adam Smith' (Finley I965: 12). The essence of the debate is caught in Rostovtzeff's classic statement, published in 1932, that the issue was 'not one of words and concepts, but of facts' and that Hellenistic Greece, in the late fourth to mid-second centuries B.C., 'differed from the modern economy only quantitatively, not qualitatively' (cited from Finley I965: 12).

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The debate is now largely laid to rest (see Will 1954: Finley I965: II-I3; 1973;

Austin & Vidal-Naquet 1977: 3-8; Cartledge 1983), but should really never have begun. As early as I909, Max Weber had demonstrated that the ancient economies did differ from the modern not only quantitatively but also qualitatively (Weber 1976). Ancient Greek and Roman society cannot be placed on a simple-complex scale like Gregory's at all.

One very useful way of looking at the ancient Greek world is to conceive the relations of production as not based in kinship or capital, but in politics. Political statuses of 'free' and unfree, citizen and alien, rather than kinship or objectified 'economic' relations, were decisive in determining a household's position relative to the means of production, the allocation of social labour, and the distribution of products (Vernant I980: I-I8; Godelier 1977b: i9; and particu- larly Finley 1973; 1981: 129). Both kinship and class in Marx's sense could contribute to deciding the membership of these political groups,4 but ancient Greece belonged to neither the clan nor the class end of the scale, nor to any intermediate position between the two.

Greece in the eighth to sixth centuries B.C. is a particularly good place to study the relationships of the gift and the commodity in an early state society. There are very clear references to the importance of gift exchange in the literary sources, although there is often ambiguity as to their precise interpretation. During this period the Greek city-state emerged, based on the ideology of a notional equality of all members of a politically defined citizen estate; and with the Greek state came the world's first true slave economies, Marx's 'Classical' mode of production (Marx I964: 82, 94). As Finley puts it, there was a move away from a continuum of statuses to an ideal of two sharply demarcated orders, the free citizens and the slaves (Finley 1973: 62-84, 95-122; I980: 67-92; 1981:

97-I66). It is difficult to place Archaic Greece in any way on Gregory's clan to class

scale. Even before the evolution of the slave economy, ancient Greece was to a considerable extent a 'class' society as Gregory uses the term (1982: 36-7), with limited slavery and unfree labourers in a position analogous to a serf:landlord relationship. Eighth- and early seventh-century literary sources seem to be describing a situation in the Aegean where nascent state communities with slavery, private ownership and a complex descriptive kinship terminology had existed for generations.5 Many features of the 'clan' society are, however, equally apparent in this world. Among the Kachin, Leach noted that hierarchical relationships were personified through the medium of the gift: the chiefs' extractions being referred to as gift giving (Leach 1954: 142-3). The same can be seen in eighth- and seventh-century Greece: in Homer's Iliad, Agamemnon offered Achilles 'Seven well-situated cities . . . who will honour him like a god with gifts' (9.149-55; repeated at 9.291-97), while Hesiod spoke of 'gift-eating chiefs' (Works and Days 3 8-9).

The land, the centre of Archaic life and the centre of any inquiry, shared many features with land in the 'clan' societies. It could be alienated under certain circumstances in the eighth century, but probably only within the community in normal situations. Hesiod urged his brother to work hard and to honour the gods, 'so you might obtain another's holding (kleros) and not another yours'

IAN MORRIS

(Works and Days 341). Throughout Greek history, however, the land generally remained the subject of what Gregory has called 'overlapping stewardship', owned-in so far as this concept applies-at several levels from the household up to the state (Gregory 1982: 44; cf. Goody I962: 297). The Greek evidence is complex, and this is of course an over-simplification, but land was certainly not normally a commodity in the Archaic period (Finley I968; Walcot 1970: 14).

Agriculture was explicitly linked with sacrifice, cooking, fertility, the family and culture as a central symbol of social reproduction-again features noted by Gregory for the clan, gift economy (Detienne I963; Vernant I98I; Vidal- Naquet I98I; see Gregory 1982: 40, 77-9).

This mixture of features of the clan and class economies is paralleled in the importance of the gift in the eighth century. As Sahlins documented, most communities practise a form of commodity exchange outside their own group (1974: 185-314); but in the literature of the eighth and seventh centuries, the ideal forms of inter-community exchange were also through the mechanism of the gift. It was socially acceptable for an aristocrat of this period to engage in overseas exchange of bulk items, but the exchanges were, it seems, preceded by the establishment of guest-friendship ties through commensality and gift giving. A passage from the Odyssey perhaps illustrates this. Athena chooses to pose as a certain Mentes, chief of a tribe called the Taphians, on a mission to exchange iron for copper. Arriving in Ithaca, she is greeted by the cry 'Wel- come, sir, to our hospitality! . . . You can tell us what has brought you when you have had some food' (Odyssey 1.123-4). First, the personal relationship; then, when this has been established, any exchanges that are desired could take place within a framework of mutual dependence and the personification of the transaction.

At this point a short aside on the nature of the literary evidence is called for. Our poems are always written from an aristocratic vantage point, and they may provide a very unbalanced view of exchange. It has even been suggested that both Homer and Hesiod were polemicising against non-aristocrats becoming involved in inter-community trade, and particularly against the rise of pro- fessional traders and the 'commodification' of exchange (Mele 1979). There is little in the primary evidence to support Mele's perhaps exaggerated reading (Cartledge 1983; Millett 1984: 88) but the gravity of the problems of the sources remains. We are largely in the dark as to how far the aristocratic gift exchange was underpinned by a stratum of commodity trade, and the importance of non-Greek traders such as the Phoenicians is particularly hard to assess. There is certainly a little evidence that by the late sixth century trade was often conducted among Greeks as between mutually independent transactors. The volume of trade involving Greeks increased dramatically in the second half of the sixth century, and it is perhaps likely that the commodity was gaining ground in this period (Finley I980: 87-8).

Coined money probably appeared in Greece early in the sixth century (Robinson i95i; i956; Kraay 1976; Waggoner 1976). There have been move- ments recently towards raising the date to c. 700 B.C. (Kagan 1982), but these have not been successful (Kroll & Waggoner 1984). The significance of the appearance of coinage for the development of commodity trade in Greece

6 IAN MORRIS

should not, however, be over-estimated. Most of the early Greek coins were of very large denominations, and their distribution was on the whole limited to the city of their origin (Will I955; Cook i958; Kraay i964). It is probably best to view early Greek coinage as the incorporation of a novel form of wealth into pre-existing channels of exchange and as a symbol of political independence, rather than as an indication of the appearance of the pre-requisites of wage labour (Marx i964: 67).6 The situation described by Gregory (ig80) in contem- porary Papua New Guinea, where cash has been assimilated into the traditional framework of the agonistic destruction of wealth may have some points of similarity.

The value of our literary evidence is necessarily restricted to the attitudes of the Greek poets and their probably largely aristocratic audiences. For them, at least, commodity exchange, even when carried on between communities, was not considered an acceptable practice for a Greek. On the whole, it seems unlikely that there was any rival, anti-aristocratic value system (Austin & Vidal-Naquet 1977: i5-i6; Donlan ig80), although the point should not be pressed too hard. There was no clearly formulated democratic theory in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. (Finley 1 983), but the democracy neverthe- less existed.

Traders standing in no personalised relationship to those with whom they were exchanging objects appear as peripheral in the early Greek literature. In Homer, the professional trader is a marginal figure, while Hesiod seems to regard the small farmer as a typical trader, driven to the activity by necessity (Works and Days 691-4). There is from an economics point of view little difference between the activities of traders such as the Phoenicians or traders such as the Greek aristocrats, but from within the system the two were worlds apart. Odysseus, the aristocrat par excellence, was very insulted at being likened to 'some skipper of a merchant crew, who spends his life on a hulking tramp, worrying about his outward freight, or keeping an eye on the cargo when he comes home with the profits he has snatched' (Odyssey 8.I59-64): and it was meant to offend. In fact, no one kept such an eagle eye on his gains as Odysseus; but these were the gains of the gift, not of commodity trade, and so both the poet and the goddess Athena heartily approved (Odyssey 13.208-3 IO).

This is not, as one historian has written, 'Little but an ideological hairline' (Humphreys 1978: I67), but a fundamental feature in the social structure of early Greece. After 700 B.C., in spite of the increasing volume of commodity trade which was probably taking place, the ideal still remained personalised gift exchange. The tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries conducted much of their diplomacy through such channels, and around 6oo B.C. Solon the Athenian wrote 'Happy is he . . . who has a (guest-) friend in foreign parts' (frag. 23).' Even in the fourth century, commodity exchange was not wholly approved of (Aristotle, Politics 1. 1256 b 26-1257 b 39), and Aristotle felt that both the individual and the state should take part in such exchanges only in so far as it was essential for survival (Politics 7. 1326 b 39-1327 a 40; cf. Plato, Laws 12.952d-953e).8 An area of the city should, he suggested, be set aside for the purpose of the commodity exchange so that it should not taint the citizens (Politics 7.133I a 30-b 3); and Aristotle again tells us that even in the fourth

IAN MORRIS 7

century generosity in gift giving was still a central feature in the definition of a nobleman (Nicomachean Ethics 1123 a 4-5). Marx's and Polanyi's treatments of Aristotle's attitudes to the 'economy' have made this feature of Classical Greek society known to a wide audience (Marx 1976: I5I-2; Polanyi 1957; more recently, see Finley 1970; Meikle 1979).

The Archaic Greek case, then, suggests that in a political society gift exchange can still flourish as a primary exchange form even within a state system. As the scale and complexity of the state grows, the relative positions of the gift and commodity are likely to change, but personification of transactors and the transacted objects through long-term social relationships and the gift is not purely a primary feature of clan societies. The Greek type of economy was probably not uncommon in prehistoric and ancient Europe; another good example is furnished by Tacitus's account of the Germans, written in A.D. 98. Their politicised society, defined by Runciman as a 'proto-state' (1982), in- cluded slavery, debt bondage, sympotic groups, a law code and incremental gift exchange (Tacitus, Germania 11-26): again we see a combination of features of the clan and class societies in association with the gift as the primary form of exchange.

The received wisdom on the evolution of exchange forms seems to be altogether too simplistic. Numerous cases can be cited from later history of the very great importance of the gift within state and even imperial systems. In early Medieval Byzantium, gift exchange co-existed with the market, and has even been described as a stimulant to production (Patlagean 1977: 181-203). Georges Duby (1974) has argued that aristocratic gift exchange in the class system of feudal western Europe in the Middle Ages was only gradually replaced by the commodity as war and the economy became separate spheres of activity in the eleventh century A.D.

There seems to be no reason why researchers should feel constrained by the approaches of Mauss, Sahlins and Gregory to exclude the possibility of a significant role for gift exchange within class and even early state societies. The case of Archaic Greece suggests that models based on both historical and ethnographic data may prove to be more useful in studies of exchange.

Archaeological correlates ofgift exchange The use of gift exchange as an explanation for the circulation of material objects in the complex prehistoric societies of central and northern Europe in the period contemporary with Archaic Greece cannot be ruled out. In this section, I will consider the question of how far it is possible to document the presence of gift exchange as a primary economic strategy in the empirical evidence available from prehistoric societies.

The main problem for the archaeologist is of course the invisibility of most of the social contexts of gift exchange. Gift giving at weddings, initiation cer- emonies of various kinds and the establishment of ties of guest-friendship cannot be expected to produce a recognisable material residue. Hodder and Orton (I976: 146) discussed the possibility of recognising reciprocal exchange in

8 IAN MORRIS

the pattern of dispersal of artefacts, but could draw no very positive conclusions. Here I will suggest a rather different approach.

Gift exchange systems often include the deliberate destruction of wealth. It is these contexts where material objects are deposited and so removed from circulation which have the greatest potential for the archaeological observation of the principles of gift exchange. Gregory (I980; 1982: 60-i) has argued that the destruction of wealth is the simplest strategy available to an individual who wishes to achieve pre-eminence in a gift society, although there are perhaps equally valid alternative explanations (e.g. Firth I965: 344-7; for grave goods, Rosenblatt et al. 1976: 67-75). How is the archaeologist to identify patterns of gift exchange from these deposits of deliberate disposal? This is an important question, which has a great bearing on the rather nebulous field of economic archaeology. I will suggest one approach which might shed some light on the problem, and will illustrate it with evidence from Early Iron Age Greece.

Anthropologists' studies since Mauss have produced a number of widely relevant cross-cultural generalisations about the workings of gift economies. Two of these can be used in this context. First, the observation that gift items generally have 'exchange-order' rather than 'exchange-value' (Firth I965: 336- 44; I967: I8). Gift objects divide up into what we can call 'spheres of exchange', with objects classified into a hierarchical sequence of ranks, and valued not cardinally but ordinally. Such spheres of exchange are very frequently found in primitive and peasant societies (Firth I964: 25). In some cases, objects can never be exchanged between spheres (e.g. Firth i965: 3 40-4), while in other cases it is possible to cross the boundaries, but only under exceptional circumstances (e. g. Bohannan 1955: 65; Barth I967: I64-5). Such a system obviously pre-supposes the absence of money, and indeed one of the most celebrated cases of a primitive currency-the Rossel Island 'shell money'-has been shown to be an example of a system with spheres of exchange, where the shells do not really function as a medium of exchange, since shells of high rank cannot be exchanged against a larger number of shells of a lower rank (Baric I964: 42).

Top rank gifts often include those objects most difficult to obtain (Gregory I980: 646), although the ranking is of course culturally specific, and sometimes factors other than scarcity are important (Firth I965: 342). Gregory (1982: 49-50) contrasts the ranking systems of the Tiv of Nigeria, the Mae-Enga of Papua New Guinea and the Melanesians of Kiriwina. While the actual objects used vary, the principles of scarcity and monopoly do have some validity in determining rank order, and a little empirical support can be found for Levi- Strauss's observation (I969: 65) that women are 'the supreme gift among those that can only be obtained by reciprocal gifts'.

The second observation is that each rank of gifts normally has an appropriate social context in which it is used. These too will differ from society to society, but rites of passage and institutionalised competition normally provide the accepted situations for the exchange of top ranked gifts (Gregory 1982: 50). On Rossel Island, for example, it was not possible to conduct a wedding ceremony without a number eighteen ndap shell (Baric I964: 44).

Spheres of exchange can act as a very powerful means of exercising social control. Where status depends upon being able to give away top ranked gifts, a

IAN MORRIS 9

group within society can attempt to perpetuate itself by limiting access to the vital items, either through controlling the supply or else through sumptuary rules (Service 1971: 145-6). Because items of one exchange rank normally cannot be used to obtain those of a higher rank, if one group establishes a monopoly over possession of the top rank of gifts, it can be very difficult indeed for those outside this group to enter it (MacCormack I98I; Gregory 1982: 53). The Tiv provide a good example of this: men aim to gain prestige by 'con- verting' items of low rank for those of high rank. This is very difficult to achieve, and anyone who is guilty of converting 'downwards' suffers disgrace (Bohannan 1955: 64).

In Homer, women, cattle, and finished objects of metal form the top rank group (e.g. Iliad 6.234-36; 23.257-886: see Finley 1978: 6i-8; 1981: 233-45).9

Hesiod's myth of the Ages of Man (Works and Days 109-20I) has been interpreted as a complex structural homology associating different groups in the worlds of men, spirits and gods with gold, silver, bronze and iron in a rank sequence (Vernant 1983: 3-72). Vernant's sophisticated reading of Hesiod is certainly not accepted by all ancient historians, but Hesiod's story does provide a striking parallel for Firth's simile describing spheres of exchange in a gift economy:

It is as if, allowing for the obvious differences, in our society gold, silver and copper were used as media of exchange in three series of transactions but there was no accurate means of rendering them in terms of each other. (Firth I965: 341)

From Homer, the primary contexts for gift-giving seem to have been mar- riages, funeral games and within guest-friendship arrangements, although many other occasions also provide a pretext for prestations. The destruction of wealth and competitive consumption is less prominent in the epics, but can be observed in burial and sacrificial practices (Morris 1985).

Deliberate disposal of wealth can act as an important method of preserving the exclusivity of top rank gifts. If objects become too common, they may lose their prestige value (Meillassoux I968; Bradley 1984: 46-57), and changes in what constitutes the highest rank of gift may alter the membership of the highest social status group, and will therefore tend to be resisted by the elite group as a basic tactic of social reproduction. For this reason the destruction of wealth, as well as being the only dimension of gift-related behaviour with a direct manifestation in the archaeological record, can be of great value for the understanding of an ancient society.

The archaeological evidence from Iron Age Greece can now be considered. Finished metal objects are the only class of objects in the top rank which are likely to be directly observable, and I will concentrate on these. Metal finds have a very limited distribution on sites of this period. This was the Early Iron Age, but there is nothing to compare with Childe's 'democratization of iron' model (Childe 1942: I4I; see Snodgrass 1971: 239; in press). In Homer, metal objects, whether gold, silver, bronze or iron, are keimelion, treasure (see Gray 1954: 2);

and while metal obviously had use value, to the Homeric heroes the joy of the possession of metal lay perhaps as much in giving it away as in using it (Finley

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1978: 6i). The same attitudes seem to surface in the poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries (Gallant 1982: 117-18).

This gift mentality has clear manifestations in the archaeological record. Metal objects come almost exclusively from contexts of deliberate disposal -graves, and after 750 B.C., sanctuaries.10 However, a problem here is the relatively small number of well excavated and published settlement sites, (see fig. i) but the evidence that there is seems to support the idea of a very limited distribution of the metal artefacts. 11 Quite a number of the excavated Early Iron Age settlements were abandoned peacefully, and this too will have affected the distribution of metal.

The largest excavation has been at Karphi in Crete, a hilltop site abandoned around IOOO B.C. Here all houses contained stone and bone tools, often in large numbers, but very few had any metal. Where scraps were recovered, generally fragments of broken ornaments, they tended to be concentrated in one room within a house (e.g. rooms 12, 17, 26 and io6), which we might surmise were storerooms rather than activity rooms. Significantly, the greatest quantity of metal scraps came from rooms 12 and 17, both within a complex known as the 'Great House', which the excavator interpreted as the chief's residence (Pen- dlebury 193 7/3 8). Large-scale excavations in recent years at the eighth-century sites of Zagora on Andros and Koukounaries on Paros have produced little metal from the settlements but in both cases rather more from associated

Ithaca Delphi Lef andi

d > <tria ) 3~~~~ Old Smyrna

Asine Afl~~~~Er;e rS ~~a gr

Sparta Koukounaries

Nichoria

Metos

0 100 200

KILOMETRES

K arh Vrokastro

FIGURE I. Sites mentioned in the text.

IAN MORRIS I I

temples to Athena; and in both cases large quantities of stone and bone tools have been found, and obsidian flakes, blades and cores from the nearby island of Melos in sealed eighth and seventh century deposits (Cambitoglou I98I: 70-8I; for a summary of work at Koukounaries, see Schilardi I983).

The evidence from destroyed settlements, presumably representing a more direct testimony, is even more valuable. A group of late ninth-century rooms at Thorikos in Attica were probably abandoned after a landslide (Bingen I967a: 25-36; i967b: 3I-49; I984: I44-49). One of these rooms had been used for the cupellation of silver, but neither silver nor lead nor any other metals were represented in the floor deposits. A stone grinder (room X) and flint blades (room III) were, however, found.

Part of an eighth-century house destroyed by fire has been excavated at Lefkandi in Euboea (Popham et al. I979/80: II-25). A single iron knife was found, along with a large number of stone tools. Another late eighth-century house destroyed by fire was excavated at Asine in the Argolid. Along with a large number of closed vases, suggesting it may have been a storeroom, it included a flint scraper and a clay weight. An iron knife was found, but was probably intrusive (Hagg I978: 93-I20).

Several houses of the tenth to seventh centuries have been excavated at Old Smyrna, apparently destroyed by fire on a number of occasions. The published account is not very thorough, but makes no mention of any metal finds (Akurgal I983: 22-33).

The only substantial deposit from a settlement was a small cup containing 5 I0 grammes of gold buried under a late eighth- or seventh-century house floor at Eretria in Euboea (Themelis I980; I983). Unfortunately, most of this small oval or apsidal house was destroyed in the third century B.C. (Themelis I98I), and its function is unclear. The hoard consists largely of scrap, and is probably to be seen as a response to an emergency rather than as a ritual deposit like those of the Central European Bronze Age (Bradley I982). We cannot establish whether the gold belonged to a rich man or a smith, but it is quite unparalleled elsewhere. In Homer, Nestor provided the gold for a smith to gild a heifer's horns (Odyssey 3.430-37), and quite possibly the Eretria deposit came from a rich man's storeroom. There were no traces of metalworking activity from the area around the house.

The general pattern is perhaps one of little use of metal in everyday activity. 12

There is some archaeological evidence that metals were onlyjust beginning to be used in industrial pursuits in the late eighth and seventh centuries, with the appearance of tool marks on stone (Adams I978; Brookes I98I).

The only contexts within settlement sites where quantities of metal have been found are very probably related to shrines and deliberate disposal. Both Nichoria Univ IV-i (MacDonald et al. I983: 32, 37, 39) and seventh century structure B-II at Perachora (Tomlinson I969: I72-90) have been so interpreted. At Vrokastro in Crete, probably abandoned in the eighth century, such metal objects as were found in the settlement were concentrated in rooms 8, I I, 13 and I7 (Hall I9I4: 99-I09; see Hayden I983: 370, 372). The excavator suggested room I7 was a shrine, and the objects were dispersed around it by post- depositional disturbance (Hall I9I4: I09).

I2 IAN MORRIS

The evidence from the settlements seems to complement the literary sources well: in Homer, the swineherd Eumaeus uses wooden mixing bowls for his wine where the elite use metal (Odyssey I4.78; i6.52), and Hesiod's description of how to make a plough does not mention a metal share (Works and Days 427-36). From this evidence I would suggest that metal objects were used little in everyday life, particularly before the end of the eighth century, when there seems to have been some increase in supplies of metal; and metal objects were not even stored as potential gifts in more than a very few houses. As the literary sources indicate, metal may have been seen above all as something to be given away, and it is therefore found in contexts of deliberate disposal rather than in the domestic sphere.

The identification of the limited distribution and the narrow range of archaeological deposits in which certain items occur may, then, be interpreted as evidence for the existence of gift exchange as an integrative and competitive mechanism, even in early state societies. The Greek evidence also offers us a second line of approach to the archaeological study of the gift. Changes in the contexts of the deliberate destruction of wealth often occur in prehistoric archaeology, and Archaic Greece is no exception. In the late eighth century, sanctuaries began to receive metal votives on a huge scale (Snodgrass I980: 54-5). Just at the same time, around 700 B.C., grave goods began to decline in many areas (although not all) where the city state was appearing.

This is a fine example of a change from gifts-to-men to gifts-to-gods in the context of the destruction of wealth (see Gregory I980). Placing objects in sanctuaries in the eighth century very obviously did have the function of placating or flattering the gods (e.g. Odyssey 3.273-5; I2.335-7; i6. I84-5), but was also an unbroken continuation of competition through incremental gift exchange. A clue is provided by the etymology of the word agalma (Gernet I98 I: i i 5). In the eighth century, an agalma was anything precious which could be used in gift exchange, but above all people and horses-items presumably in the first rank. This noun comes from the verb agallein, 'to adorn' or 'to honour'. In the fifth century and later, though, agalma came to mean only an offering to the gods, and above all a statue placed in a sanctuary. In modern Greek, to acgalma means simply 'statue'. Here the linguistic evidence very clearly supports the idea of a changed context for the disposal of wealth rather than a change in the function of parting with valuable objects. The inscriptions with donors' names found on some of the offerings in Greek sanctuaries further suggest that display and conspicuous consumption remained an important element. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B. C., tells us how in the mid-sixth century Croesus, king of Lydia, sought to impress the Greeks by sending gifts to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi; and even that a particular Delphian, eager to please the Spartans, inscribed 'Given by the Lacedaimonians' on a gold vessel in fact sent by Croesus (Herodotus I .50-5 I). Some of the objects found in the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus on the Aegean coast of Turkey had parts of the inscription Basileus Kroisos anetheken ('King Croesus dedicated this') preserved (Tod I933: #6; Fornara I979: #28). Herodotus (I.92) actually goes so far as to mention that the pillars from which these inscriptions came were provided by Croesus, along with oxen made of gold.

IAN MORRIS I3

In Greece, the changeover in the eighth century from gifts-to-men to gifts-to-gods (and particularly the state and inter-state gods) did not affect the use of competitive destruction of wealth as a means of ranking households and even states, just as changes in the outward forms of the Kwakiutl potlatch and Papuan gift giving following on the penetration of wage labour and cash did not alter the underlying principles of these institutions (Gregory I980: 648-9).

It is very probable that the change to the sanctuary as a context for the disposal of wealth was linked to a need to represent aristocratic competition as having a wider communal value at a time of great social stress, when aristocrats were facing serious problems in legitimising their privileged positions (Morris I985). As often happens in such periods, the material record undergoes a radical transformation (cf. Kristiansen I984: 96, n. i). In the case of Archaic Greece, changes in the context of the destruction of gift wealth may have been linked to profound structural changes in society, and in particular the 'bursting open' of an unstable, competitive culture through the appearance of new wealth and incorporation into larger economic systems in the eighth to sixth centuries (cf. Qviller I98I; Rowlands I980: 20).

Summing up, I have argued that the literary evidence from Archaic Greece suggests that some of the ethnographically derived models of the relationships of forms of subsistence and social organisation to exchange need to be modified in the light of historical data. Gift exchange could be very important even within state societies. I have further suggested that while the archaeologist can only observe gift exchange indirectly, through contexts of the destruction of wealth, it is nevertheless possible to infer the presence of the gift and restricted spheres of exchange from the distribution of artefacts, and to attach very considerable importance to changes in the contexts of the deliberate disposal of high-ranked gifts.

NOTES

This article is based on a paper read at the Annual conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group at Cambridge, on I4th December I984, in the session 'Fetish and phantasm: value, prestige and consumption'. I should like to thank the session organisers, Mike Parker Pearson and Richard Bradley, for their advice and encouragement; and Paul Cartledge, Moses Finley, Anthony Snod- grass and Robin Torrence for reading earlier drafts. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors of fact or fancy which appear in the text.

Translations of all the ancient authors cited are easily available in the Penguin Classics series. 1 By 'primary mechanism' I mean the exchange form which is structurally dominant. Structural

dominance is not necessarily a matter of the absolute numbers of gift exchanges or even the relative proportions of gift and commodity exchanges (which in any case cannot be recovered for ancient societies), but the function and location of the practice. If the actors considered the gift the most important way to exchange people and things, then we can speak in emic terms of a gift economy.

2 Mauss's argument that the gift was ultimately inalienable and inseparable from the person of the donor seems to rest above all on his account ofthe hau ofthe gift among the Maori (I954: 8-iO). The view that the Maoris saw the exchange of gifts as the exchange of persons has been successfully challenged (Sahlins I974: I49-68), as has the validity of this argument as a cross-cultural generalls- ation (Firth I967: 9-IO). In the Archaic Greek evidence discussed here, the obligation to return gifts is presented as social, political, economic and moral, and the gift is not treated as an extension of the person.

3 The idea of a continuum is also to be found in the writings of Raymond Firth (e.g. I 967: 6). 4 In Athens, membership of the citizen estate seems to have been determined by descent in the

I4 IAN MORRIS

seventh century, to have been changed to a criterion of wealth in Solon's reforms of 594/3 B.C., and then back to birth in Cleisthenes's reforms of 5o8/6 B.C. (see Davies I977/8).

5 The richest and earliest literary evidence in this period is the poetry of Homer. Many methodological problems surround its use. Finley has suggested that these orally composed poems represent a memory of the institutions of the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. (I978: 48), while Snodgrass has argued for an ahistorical melange of elements drawn from traditions of the thirteenth to eighth centuries (I974). Both these views seem to me to be mistaken in their assumptions concerning the relationship of oral heroic poetry to the society in which it is performed (see Redfield I975; Finnegan I977; Goody I977; Ong I982; Henige I982). The poems cannot be treated as a direct source of social history for any period, being rather a complex transformation of the poet's and audience's lived experiences in the eighth century (Morris in press). The Iliad and Odyssey must be handled with care; they represent a particular ideologically slanted world view, but nevertheless one which throws considerable light on the period (cf. Rowlands I980: 2I-8), especially when used in conjunction with other early Greek literature.

6 Although, as Marx noted in a letter to Engels, Greek coined money did provide for the emergence of the first large group of wage labourers in history, the mercenaries (Ste. Croix I98I: 24-5).

7 Solon also wrote of 'one man, who ranges the fishy deep in a ship to bring home gain, tossed by grievous winds, putting no value on his life' (frag. I3, lines 44-46), which may well refer to commodity trade. It is important, however, to note that Solon wrote this poem to criticise the unrighteous pursuit of wealth (lines 7-32). On the possible role of gift exchange and reciprocity in Solon's career, see Gallant (I982: I I2).

8 It should be noted that Aristotle's views may have been very extreme, and their relationship to customary behaviour and attitudes in the fourth century is likely to be complex and subtle.

9 The contexts for giving each type of gift varied: cattle seem to have been largely confined to bridewealth prestations (Iliad II.242-43; i8.593; Hesiod, Catalogue of Women fr. 7, line 9) and funerary consumption (Iliad 23. I66).

10 While awareness of the uneven distribution of metal finds is on the increase (e.g. Snodgrass in press) this claim will still surprise some Classical archaeologists. A few settlement sites are examined below, and I hope to pursue the question of the social organisation of metalworking at greater length elsewhere.

1 In particular, the evidence from recent excavations supports this argument: there is a strong possibility that badly corroded iron finds may have been ignored in early excavations in Greece (Snodgrass I97I: 2I6).

12 References in Homer are relatively few (see Gray I954: 5), and their significance is not always clear. Nine of the eighteen references to bronze tools are in divine or sacrificial contexts, and nine of Gray's thirteen references to iron tools are in fact to the single episode of the iron axes used in the competition for Penelope's hand in Odysseus's palace. The situation should not be exaggerated, and the references to metal tools in similes suggest at least limited use. In one passage (Odyssey I4.4I8) Odysseus's swineherd chops wood with a bronze axe; although on the other hand it should be noted that the one verse often interpreted as a reference to iron farm tools (Iliad 23.834) in fact merely speaks of a nobleman sending his shepherd or ploughman into town in order to fetch iron, not of iron tools as such.

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