Invisible Trade
14th February 2025
Archaeologists get frustrated when they know something should be there, but no records have been found yet, and what they are looking for doesn’t survive. Grain was traded in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but unless there are sales receipts, or the granary burned down and so preserved the contents, we’ll never know how much and to whom. Ditto fabric. Textiles were probably one of the largest category of long-distance trade, based on later patterns of exchange, but again, unless it burned and archaeologists find traces, no one will ever know.
One of the things archaeologists have peen puzzling over for a few decades is, “What went where that we can’t see?” Food is one of those things. Sometimes the containers survived, like the famous amphorae of the Classical world that one finds all over, including along shipping routes. Apparently some of the wine was tested for quality by the shipping crew while enroute. Olive pits are another thing that sometime survive, along with the amphorae for the oil (and perfume flasks, although those are more rare.) Dried fruit might have been shipped as well, based on cuneiform tablets accidentally baked hard when a city was sacked. Dried meat? Beer? Well, probably not beer, because it didn’t keep well before hops was added as an ingredient. Vegetables of some sort? Probably locally, but how far is local? We’ll never know, unless charred bits are found that are clearly not from the area where they are excavated.