EXCHANGE NETWORKS: PREHISTORY.

The article explores the trade and other forms of exchange among prehistoric peoples as an enduring and indeed traditional topic in archeology. This topic has been recently realized as an object of extremely innovative and exciting research. Its historical value lies in the artifactual and stylistic exotics used for cross-dating and relative chronology as well as in the presumed social mechanism in diffusion or in the stimulation of tribal societies by more advanced groups. However, the incidence of exchange and the nature of the various institutions through which it may have taken place are becoming much less matters of indirect interpretation because these determinations of raw material sources, identification of routes of movements, and other reasons have surpassed these.