The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Imports, Trade, and Institutions 1300-700 BCE

Description

In this book, Sarah Murray provides a comprehensive treatment of textual and archaeological evidence for the long-distance trade economy of Greece across 600 years during the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. Analyzing the finished objects that sustained this kind of trade, she also situates these artifacts within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean economy, including evidence for the import and export of commodities as well as demographic change. Murray argues that our current model of exchange during the Late Bronze Age is in need of a thoroughgoing reformulation. She demonstrates that the association of imported objects with elite self-fashioning is not supported by the evidence from any period in early Greek history. Moreover, the notional 'decline' in trade during Greece's purported Dark Age appears to be the result of severe economic contraction, rather than a severance of access to trade routes.

Sarah Murray is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies and a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She has also taught at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she was a Visiting Assistant Professor. She has over ten years of field experience as an archaeologist in Greece, most recently as photogrammetry specialist at the Mazi Archaeological Project in West Attica. Murray has written articles on digital field methods, historiography, and early Greece for the Journal of Field Archaeology, and Hesperia.