Abstract

Exchange in the early Middle Ages has traditionally been studied from a ‘technological’, ‘economic’ or ‘socio-political’ perspective, and has examined such issues as transport practices, supply and demand, or the ways in which exchange helps to maintain and reproduce the socio-political order. A particular focus of research has been the significance of the exchange of prestige goods for the power of the king and the aristocracy. There has been almost no analysis to date of the complexity of the exchange system as a whole, which – together with the exchange of commodities and gifts – includes the keeping of objects. Nor have archaeologists paid much attention to the relationship between forms of exchange (and the norms and values associated with them) and the imaginary world from which ‘value’ is derived in exchange. In the early medieval Frankish world there seems to have been a close relationship between exchange and the imaginary Christian world. In this contribution, I will attempt to examine the relationship between exchange and the imaginary world in the early Middle Ages, and to demonstrate how the results can modify the picture we have of central places like Maastricht (an old centre) and Dorestad (one of the new emporia).

This characteristically thoughtful essay by Frans Theuws illustrates how far our analysis of central places in the early Middle Ages has advanced. Like his study of Maastricht (2001), it reveals a close reading of the archaeological and historical sources. Indeed, as Michael McCormick's encyclopaedic volume (2001) on the origins of the medieval economy shows with stunning authority, as archaeologists we have taken huge strides since Philip Grierson quipped, ‘It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak’ (1959, 129). Hence it comes as no surprise that Theuws is exploring the ‘relationship between forms of exchange and the imaginary world from which “value” is derived’ (p. 121).

Frans Theuws's paper reinforces and extends the developing critique of the early medieval economy as structured around gifts and commodities (for the ‘orthodoxy’, see Hodges 1982 and Hedeager 1993; for the critique, see Moreland 2000a and 2000b; Samson 1991; also Godelier 1999 (1996); and Thomas 1991). In the past, our assumptions about why certain objects were deemed valuable, and why they should have circulated as prestige gifts, have been influenced by notions of inherent worth (gold, silver and so on) or by the unthinking application of the laws of supply and demand (objects from afar are in short supply and must therefore be valuable). The proposition that value derives from the ‘imaginary world’ is one of the most significant in his paper and I will return to consider its implications in some detail.

Ideas do not develop in a vacuum, they are stimulated by debate. The European Science Foundation programme on the ‘Transformation of the Roman world’, in which I participated, was a magnificent opportunity for the rekindling of this debate. The project entailed the creation of different study groups around such topics as economy, rituals and power, and culture. As a consequence, the realization dawned that the organizational separation into these social spheres generated just as many new perspectives as it hid from view. Once the separate spheres had been scrutinized, our perception of the relationship between rituals, economy and culture remained a key objective of research. It is most fortunate that Richard Hodges and John Moreland, representatives of the ‘production, distribution and demand group’, have now joined the debate because their contributions lead to further refinements, thus bringing us closer to the ‘essence of the early Middle Ages’.

Archaeological interest in pastoralism – i.e. the predominant reliance on herded animals such as sheep and cattle for the production of food and other items for domestic consumption and (market) exchange – is gradually growing in the Mediterranean region and elsewhere. Ethno-archaeological studies in particular have paid attention to recent historical and contemporary pastoral economies as a consequence of the difficulties in recognizing pastoral material culture in the archaeological evidence. This paper will present an ethno-archaeological case study of recent pastoral economies in a mountain region in Sardinia (Italy), which have been investigated from a landscape perspective. I argue that the archaeologically visible features of pastoral and rural landscapes generally should be considered the outcome of both spatially and temporally diverse rural practices on the local level and their interaction with wider economic and political structures.

Archaeologists have ‘discovered’ memory, drawing on historical and anthropological insights into commemoration and interrogating the contexts of archaeological exploration in ways that sometimes produce evidence of specific understandings of the past by ancient populations. Analogy is sometimes suggestive, as, notably, when archaeology's own historical emergence provides interesting parallels with ancient antiquarianism. Difficulties arise, however, from the heavily psychological cast of much work on memory, which displaces the older archaeological interest in ‘influence’ without always preserving the accompanying focus on patterns of cultural imitation and absorption. The best work on prehistory appears to focus on patterns of co-occurrence but, in the absence of textual evidence, methods often lack rigour and ideologically sensitive reflexivity; especially problematic are the frequent attributions of intentionality. Claims that memory (or its obliteration) was itself the focus of acts recorded in the archaeological record thus underscore both the temptations and the limits of the current concern with this topic.

Several recent publications on ‘the past in the past’ raise the issue that remains from older pasts existed in younger pasts, just like the fabric of our present-day world is made up of materials from the past. Archaeology in fact studies material culture that exists in the present; it deals with memory recorded in matter and not with events or moments from the past. This essay explores the consequences of this for archaeology's understanding of time. It argues that historic time should not be viewed as the ‘empty and homogeneous’ time of historicism – the time of dates, chronologies and periods – but on the contrary as the full and heterogeneous time of the fusion between the present and the past.