Institutionalisation and market integration in the archaic Greek economy. Modelling overseas trade from the distribution pattern of Samian transport amphoras

This article advances the view that there was widespread institutionalisation in the early Greek economy right from the end of the eighth century BCE. Challenging the widespread assumption that Mediterranean market integration crystallised much later and only by the end of the ‘archaic period’, agent based modelling is used here alongside the archaeological distribution of Samian transport amphoras to demonstrate the co-ordination that must have existed between trade partners in shipping olive oil from one corner of the Mediterranean to the other. ‘Brownian flow’ models of randomised drift fail to properly reproduce the amphora pattern, while a network of trade hubs stretching from the Black Sea to the shores of modern-day Spain provides a much more robust solution. While these results shed some light on the navigation of various environmental niches and on the lived experience of the sailors distributing products like Samian olive oil, the most important implication of this analysis is that the early Greek economy was more organised —and earlier, too— than we have previously suspected.