Trade and Exhange

Beginning in the 16 th century, regional political, social and economic interaction spawned a re-emergence of far-reaching regional trade and exchange networks across the Midwest. In northwestern Ohio, aboriginal participation in these networks is manifested in the appearance of red stone, marine shell and native copper goods on several sites of the late pre-contact Sandusky Tradition. By the beginning of the 17 th century, native copper goods had been almost completely supplanted by goods fashioned from European copper and brass. This paper outlines the transition to European source materials and the context for 17 th century Sandusky Tradition interaction with populations throughout southern Ohio and the Midwest. Rather than coalescing to be middle men in a fur trade network, the evidence points to Sandusky Tradition groups ultimately dispersing to remain autonomous in a largely native interaction sphere.

Exchange is a central focus of a large portion of modern obsidian studies, and the reconstruction of various exchange mechanisms using provenance data has a long history in the discipline. While modeling the movement of objects across space is revealing, it is also critical to flesh out the implications of exchange relationships and their capacity to create, reify, and reflect distinct cultural groups. Archaeologists often assume that people who share the same material culture also share similar cultural practices, kin relations, or ethnic identities, which in the context of obsidian sourcing has been applied through the analysis of similarities and differences in procurement and exploitation.

Using obsidian as a proxy, this paper takes a long-term perspective on prehistoric group interaction and social identity on the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica, where obsidian sources on Monte Arci were exploited from the Neolithic through Bronze Ages. Social network analysis (SNA) is employed to identify the strengths of inter-site relationships through time based on the relative proportions of raw materials from the four main subsources at Monte Arci. We in turn argue that prehistoric social networks in Sardinia and Corsica are complex and reflect a long history of mutable cultural boundaries that were mediated by the flow of goods and information.