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Measuring the Flow of Goods with Archaeological Data


Author(s): John R. Clark
Source: Economic Geography, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 1-17
Published by: Clark University
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ECONOMIC
VOL. 55

GEOGRAPHY

JANUARY, 1979

No. 1

.IEASURING THE FLOW OF GOODS


WITH ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA*
JOHN R. CLARK

University of California,Los Angeles


Ian Hodder and Colin Renfrew have hypothesized that the nature of
ancient trading systems can be deduced from the curvature of distance
decay gradients derived from the dispersal of artifacts recovered at archaeological sites. They identify three types of exchange: "local,"with a gradient
convex to the origin in a single-log interaction model, "down-the-line,"with
a linear gradient, and "random-walk,"with a gradient concave to the origin.
The random-walk pattern is said to be characteristic of complex trading
networks. Roman period coins excavated at Dura Europus in Syria were
used to test these ideas. The trading system was complex, therefore random-walk curvature was anticipated, but the curves were highly convex
to the origin, contrary to expectations. This could be the result of circulation across the boundary of the region where the coins had value as money.
Interaction values would have been artificially raised within the monetary
zone and depressed outside of it, producing strong curvature. The pattern
of steepness of the gradients conforms to expectations based on the value
and transportabilityof the coins. It is also likely that political conditions
and Roman monetary policy influenced the gradients.

Archaeologists have long been interested in economic prehistoiy and in recent years have been increasingly interested in modeling the archaeological
evidence [5; 12]. A number of methodologies, including those commonly used
by geographers, have been identified and
applied to their data. Nearest neighbor
and quadrat analysis have been used to
examine settlement patterns [8; 12, pp.
30-52]; central place theory has been
applied to settlement hierarchies [15;
* I wish to
acknowledge the support of the
Regents of the University of California for this
study and the valuable help of Dr. W. A. V.
Clark in the preparation of the manuscript.

21]; and network analysis [14] and distance decay models [11; 12, pp. 98-125,
183-97; 24; 26; 29] have been used to
study exchange systems. The latter are
particularly interesting, for many archaeologists [9; 14; 23; 28; 34] feel that they
are important markers of social evolution.
Archaeologists have asked two basic
but interrelated questions concerning exchange: what was the early history of
the technology of moving goods over
space, and what was the early history of
the social organization of exchange systems? It is obvious that the two are
closely intertwined, for, like the physical

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

mode of transport, the organization of


exchange systems is itself a technology,
a social technology. Certainly it has the
result of easing the movement of goods,
which can be measured by the distance
decay gradient in a variety of interaction models. Tracing the social evolution
of trading systems on the basis of mute
archaeological remains is obviously more
difficult than measuring the ease with
which they are moved, yet Hodder and
Renfrew [11; 12, pp. 109-15; 26, pp. 7782; 27, pp. 466-701 are attempting to do
this.
This effort to delineate social change
through the application of geographic
models is intriguing, but it faces a number of problems. Many stem from the
scarcity and doubtful quality of data,
which makes it hard to estimate the
value of model parameters, to show that
sample statistics are significantly different from zero, or that several values in
a time series are significantly different
from one another, thus indicating a temporal trend.
Archaeologists share many of the
problems faced by geographers interested in the study of a particular region.
Their training focuses their attention on
the problems of a particular period in a
particular region and they are, for the
most part, forced to make do with the
data that either happen to be available
or that they can generate themselves.
When geographers became interested in
theory and modeling, the problem got
turned around. The models, intended to
be general, were not supposed to be
sensitive to period and place specific
phenomena. Thus, data were sought
which met the requirements of the models; and as the sophistication of the models increased so did the sophistication of
the data requirements. As a result, a lot
of work has been done on places like
Cedar Rapids or Malmo where "good"
data are available.
If a similar trend is to be followed in
the study of the geography of the distant past, data must be sought which

meet the minimum requirements of even


a simple model. Accordingly, my purpose here is to explore Renfrew's and
Hodder's ideas with the aid of data that
are archaeological but have been chosen
for their ability to fit the needs of the
models discussed by the two archaeologists. In this case the data are coins of
the Roman period excavated at Dura
Europus in Syria [11].
THE MODEL

The relative ease of movement of


goods, whether the result of social organization or transport technology, can be
measured with the distance decay gradient of an interaction model; for a given
good, the more gentle the gradient the
more easily distance is being overcome.
Tracing the social evolution of exchange
systems is more difficult, but Renfrew
and Hodder [11; 12; 26] state that we
can use the shape of the curvature of the
distance decay gradient to detelmine the
nature of the exchange system. The curvature of the gradient can be measured
by a, which is the power to which the
distance data must be raised to make the
relationship between interaction and distance linear in a simple regression [31].
Both the distance decay gradient and a
can be derived from a single-log interaction model [10; 31], which has been applied to a large number of modern situations [10; 22; 31] and is also the model
chosen by Hodder and Renfrew to examine archaeological data (Table 1).
The simplest form of the single-log
model is:
log lj - a - b Dij

(1)

where:
log I,j

- the
logarithm of the interaction between two places, i

and j;

Dj

==the distance between i and j.

FLOWS
ARCHAEOLOGICAL
TABLE 1
HODDER'S

AND OKVALUES

FROM

ARCHAEOLOGICAL

Era

Neolithic

Article

ROMAN

PERIOD

MATERIALS

Fine/Coarse

b(=log I/km.)

British Stone
F

Axes: Group I

Roman

AND

NEOLITHIC

<

.1

Group VI

-.03

Lizard Head Pottery

-.05

Anatolian Obsidian

-.027

.9

Picrite Hammers

-.124

.6

>2.5
1.6

Oxford Pottery

-.024

New Forest Pottery

-.03

Rowland's Castle Pottery

-.05

Malvern Pottery

-.10

.2

Savernake Pottery

-.21

.4

1.0
<

.1
1.1

Source: Hodder [11].

In an empirical examination of the


movement of goods, the value of the distance decay gradient, b, can be affected
by at least three things: the efficiency of
the transport system, the perishability of
the objects, and the value per weight of
the objects transported. As a transport
system becomes more efficient the absolute value of b declines for any item.
However, in all systems the absolute
value of b is higher for cheap, bulky
goods than it is for valuable, compact
ones [26, p. 77]. If the efficiency of trade
is to be measured, it must be measured
through the movement of a standard
commodity. Conversely, if the transportability of various goods is to be measured, they should be flowing through
the same transport system.
The model assumes that the data are
linear once the basic form of the model
has been chosen. This is seldom true, so
the practice of transforming the distances by raising them to a power to
make the relationship between interaction and distance linear has been
adopted. The transformation' appears
1 Usually,distancedecay slopes (b) are cal-

as:
logij

= a-bDj

(2)

An iterative algorithm to determine


alpha has been outlined by Taylor [31,
pp. 231-3], and a similar procedure has
been followed here.2

2 In each case alpha was found by the followingfive steps:


1. The raw distancedata were transformed
to fit equation(3) by raisingthem to successive powers rangingfrom -3 to +3, but excluding zero. After step 3 (below), if alpha
provedto lie outsidethis range,higheror lower
powerswere tried,until the minimumstandard
errorof b was found to lie betweentwo of the
valuestested.
2. Before regressionswere run to try to
bracketthe minimumstandarderror,the newly
transformeddistancedata as well as the interactiondata were convertedto z-scores(x - 0,
s.d.x - 1). If this is not done, the raisingof
distanceto successivepowers changesits distributionby stretchingit out, which changes
the regressionslope (b), makingits absolute
value smaller as ao gets larger. As b gets
smaller,its standarderroralso gets smallerand
will not reach a minimumunless the data are
convertedto z-scoresfirst.
culated from untransformeddata (a =- 1), for
3. Regressionswere run to try to bracketthe
slopes from data transformedby differenta minimumstandarderrorbetween two integer
would no longer be comparable[11, p. 1791. valuesof oa.

ECONOMICGEOGRAPHY

Several hypotheses about a have been der's [11] derivation of a values that
advanced by Renfrew [26, pp. 77-85]. were 0.6 or smaller, including some that
The first postulates a "down-the-line" were probably negative, although he did
mode of exchange where a group receiv- not test for values of a less than 0.1.
ing trade objects from a source outside Renfrew [26, p. 84] explained these
their community keeps a fixed propor- alphas as representing "supply zone" extion and trades the rest to communities change, and noted Hodder's conclusion
in a one-dimensional chain of exchang- that these were associated with steep
ing communities farther from the source. distance decay slopes. This doesn't fit
At any distance D, the amount passed well with Renfrew's diagrams [26, p. 78;
on (I) is:
27, pp. 466-70] which show "supply
zone" slopes to be both very gentle and
I 1I, e-7D
(3)
concave to the origin. A better explanation is that these represent trade in items
where o1 is the amount leaving the that have
only local distribution. This
source area and k is the proportion fits with both the
steep attenuation
( <1) passed on per unit of distance. In slopes and Hodder's observation [11,
p.
its linear folrnn,
182] that many of the items in this category were produced in small quantities,
log I = log Io- kD
(4)
probably for local consumption.
The gradients for the coin data examD is not raised to any power, therefore
in the present study should be relained
a
1.
tively
gentle (since coins are high-value
A second hypothesis is that in more
items)
compared to the cases examined
complex trading systems where goods
Hodder (Table 1), which for the
by
move
in
might
any direction, not just most
part were either stone or ceramic
away from the source or in a one-dimenwhich were relatively hard to
goods
sional chain of exchange, a random walk
The a values should be near
transport.
would be approximated. Renfrew defor
the
coins are moving in a rela2.0,
rives the equation:
tively complex trading system.
I

e-bD

(5)

which has the linear form:


logI = log Io = bD2

(6)

where b can be a regression coefficient.


In this case the distance is squared,
therefore a = 2.
The third hypothesis stems from Hod4. If the minimum was not bracketed, the
programwas sent back to step I to choose new
trial values for a.
5. Once bracketed, say between I and 2, a
succession of a values incremented by 0.1
(1.1, 1.2, ...,

1.9) were tried and run through

steps 1-3, to find the power which generated


the smallest standard error of b. This power
was accepted as the value of a, determined to
the nearest tenth.

DATA PROBLEMS

The quality of data is a major problem for the spatial modeling of archaeological material. If we are unsure that a
set of data fulfills the requirements of a
particular model, then any tests of that
model made with these data will be
equally unsure. Data problems facing
the archaeologist attempting to work
with distance decay models have been
outlined by Hodder and Orton [21, pp.
104-8] and Wright [33]. They can be
summarized as follows:
1. Regional differences in field work.
If the intensity of field work varies from
area to area, the areas of more intensive
field work will turn up more data and
thus more "interaction" with the sources
of the objects, than will areas where field

ARCHAEOLOGICAL
FLOWS

work is scanty. This can be a particular


problem when using site or material density as the interaction variable. Hodder
and Orton [12, p. 105] proposed recording of "negatives" (contemporaneous
sites without the item being studied) to
control for variations in field work intensity.
2. Variations in the sampling of assemblages recovered at different sites. In
the course of digging a site, some
archaeologists select what they will keep
on the basis of variable criteria, while
others keep everything. If one uses the
percentage of pottery produced at a certain kiln that was found at a site as a
measure of the intensity of interaction
between the kiln and site, anything that
is thrown away will influence the "interaction" value. Also, whatever is dug from
a part of a site might not be representative of the entire settlement.
3. Variation in sample size. Hodder
and Orton found that pottery samples
from Romano-British sites varied from
10 sherds to over 500. Percentages calculated from small samples are unreliable,
and raising the minimum size of assemblages accepted for inclusion in a study
raises the consistency of the results, but
also means that fewer sites will be included and information lost.
4. Difficulty of dating collections.
Even pottery from historic contexts such
as Roman Britain can often only be
dated to within - 60 years. An assemblage representing a period when the
production of a given type was abundant would tend to have a higher percentage of that style than another site
which represents a period of smaller output. The relative abundance of the style
at a site could thus be the result of either
patterns of production or trade. Without
firm dating of the production of the objects and the period of habitation of the
site, there is no solution to this problem
[12, p. 106].
5. Measurement of interaction. It is
simpler to count the items than to weigh
them, and IHodder and Orton [12, p.

106] state that if there is no evidence of


systematic bias, counts should be used.
Wright [33, pp. 172-3] took the opposite
view for obsidian studies, stating that
obsidian objects get consistently smaller
farther from the source of the material,
and recommended that weights be used
exclusively. The choice rests with the
type of material under study and the
availability of appropriate data.
None of these problems is trivial, for
each could introduce unknown bias into
the data. Thus, one should choose data
that avoid as many of these problems as
possible.
All of the data sets used by Hodder
(Table 1) share these problems to some
extent, but as mentioned earlier, archaeologists have usually been interested in
the problems of a particular era and region and have taken data applicable to
the models that attract them. When the
usefulness of a model is in doubt, it's
best to seek out data which are as free
from bias as possible and where many
things about the data and its context are
known, so that the behavior predicted by
the model can be checked against reality.
The new data chosen for the present
analysis are the bronze coins minted by
Greek cities in the Asiatic parts of the
Roman Empire excavated at Dura Europus by the French and American expeditions of 1926-1937 [1]. These data offer
several advantages:
1. They came from a single site so
there is little variation in the standards
of field work.
2. Coins are thought to be valuable by
all archaeologists so none are thrown
away. Some disintegrate, which might
introduce bias, but at least this is not the
result of the excavator's on-the-spot decisions.
3. The sample size (8619 coins) is
large.
4. The chronology of the coins (dated
by emperor's portraits) is well known.
Most coins can be dated within -- 10
years. Since the data used here cover a

ECONOMICGEOGRAPHY

period of about 280 years, we know that


the site existed during the entire production of all the items (1 item = the coins
of 1 emperor) except the last (coins of
Valerian and Gallienus) which will be
excluded from the study.
5. Counts can be used, for coins are
discrete units, both to us and to the people who made them. The range of
weight for the bronze issues is relatively
small, the largest weighing about 12
times the smallest, and weight does not
vary with distance from the site of production.
6. The value of the bronze in the
coins was probably fairly constant, thus
the variations in b over time should be
the result of changes in either interaction conditions or sampling error and
not the value of the objects.
7. The provenance of the coins is
known, for each coin was minted with
the name of the city which issued it.
8. It is possible to estimate the total
production of each city's or region's
coins by counting the number of each
contained in major collections. This is
not an exact method, but at least its results can be tested against other data
that we have about these places.
9. We know a lot about social and
economic conditions of the period, therefore b should vary in a predictable way
[4] and a should remain fairly constant
(near 2), since in this case we are dealing with a well-developed trading network.
A major drawback of this particular
data set is that there are no "close in"
contacts. Since much of Taylor's [31]
discussion of distance transformation
concerns short distance interaction, this
is unfortunate, but unavoidable.
DATA PREPARATION

Calibrating the parameters under investigation here requires two variables:


one representing interaction, the other
distance. In the studies by Hodder and
Renfrew, interaction between the source

of an object and its destination was measured as a proportion of the objects of a


given class (pottery, stone) that came
from a particular source (potsherds from
the Oxford kilns or obsidian from Cappadocia). With the Dura material, instead of dealing with a single source and
many destinations, we have many
sources and a single destination. This
makes little difference except that we
need an estimate of the production of
objects at each source. The production
estimates used here are the published
coin holdings of the British Museum
(BMC) [3]. Use of the collection is justified if it is a representative sample of
what was actually produced. Since the
coins were struck with handmade dies
which must have had some rate of wear
and breakage [7, pp. 640-707], cities or
regions which issued large numbers of
coins must have used many dies representing a variety of imperial portraits
and reverse types. A large reference collection contains selection of types and
dies which, if large enough, should be
representative of the real production of
these places. Listings of all known types
(corpi) of the coinages of only 15 of the
cities in the Near East have been published [2; 13; 16; 17; 18; 19; 25; 30]. The
advantage of using the BMC as opposed
to the corpi, is that it gives nearly complete geographic coverage of the Greek
coinage; almost every city that produced
coins is represented there. The present
study covers all the possible sources of
the coins recovered at the archaeological
site, the coins produced in 359 cities of
the Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire between 27 B.C. and 276 A.D.
If the material in the BMC is representative of what was produced, then
there should be a strong positive relationship between the number of types
listed in the corpi and the size of the
BMC holdings of the same 15 cities. The
correspondence should hold over time
as well as space, thus the coins in both
data sets were grouped into 30 regnal
periods and midpoints for each reign

to

to

>

>

>

0
O

o
"

o
Q

>

b b b

Ca 00
oo

1 Ilium

oo

2. Alexandria

toCq

00

CJ

GO o0

Ca

t-i

c;

3. Antioch

00

0o

,-

4. Caesarea

Troas

in Pisidia

z
0

Q00

Cappadociae

tH
0

o
0

oo

ca

5. Aelia Capitolina
(Jerusalem)

co

6. Akko-Ptolemais

-to co
01

-4

7. Caesarea

Maritima

0
o'

8. Adramytion

CID

c0

LIZ

0o

9. Apollonia

Co
0
0

10. Attaia

o
0

co
Cal o>

o0

0
o12.

0o

0O

0o

0
o14.

SAkO7Ij

11. Hadrianeia

Hadrianoi

13. Hadrianotherai

Kame

15. Priene

7VJ)IOO7O1VHOUV

03

TABLE 8
NUMBER

OF TYPES,

BY PERIOD,

LISTED

IN

THE

COIRPI OF

15

CITIES

IN

THE

STUDY

City

10 B.C.-70
A.D.
A.D.
Period 15$0-210
10B.C.-70A.D.

A.D.
70-150
70-150 A.D.

20-25

.AD

14

/
Xi

.l

15"

110Q
,-4
13

210-20
AD

0M

15
12
16
16

2532

A..

2 Si

0 15
n14
,

190
B

27

43o

51

85

21
2

10
0

12
28
28

21
21
35

125
(N

171
co

89

SS
i^

44
c

l;5

50

29

1046

65

46

0
42
2

4
B150
24
24

20
64
64

0
41
42
42

15
29
12
12

19
90
19
19

150-210

A.D.

110

125

171

89

55

44

35

43

51

210-230

A.D.

13

50

29

104

65

46

34

21

10

230-253

A.D.

12

42

130

20

41

29

90

22

12

69

127

43

33

253-276 A.D.

I Sources listed in brackets after city names.

ARCHAEOLOGICALFLOWS

were determined. The data were then


grouped into six periods of 80, 80, 60, 20,
23, and 23 years (Tables 2 and 3). The
data were relatively scanty in the earlier
periods, thus longer spans of time were
needed to assemble enough coins for a
meaningful analysis. The coins of the individual regnal periods were assigned to
the six longer periods on the basis of
location of the regnal period's midpoint.
All non-zero values in the corpi and the
corresponding cells in the BMC table
were incremented by one and transformed to logarithms, for the raw data
have the strong positive skew characteristic of city-size distributions. Then
both raw and transformed data were
correlated. There is a fairly strong resemblance between the BMC and the
corpi: r2 : 0.64 for raw data and r2 =
0.72 for transformed data (both significant at .001 level).
If the number of types is the best
available measure of production, it
could be argued that it would be better
to weed out the duplicates and use the
number of types in the BMC as the
populations rather than the total number
in the collection. This might be true, but
given the state of the coins (poor strikes,
wear, illegible inscriptions) it is frequently impossible to determine whether
coins are duplicates. Reference to a
corpus would help, but only about 4
percent of the cities listed in the BMC
have corpi. Thus, it is not certain how
many types are represented. Counting,
while perhaps not ideal, is at least reproducible. The same arguments apply
to the treatment of the Dura material.
For use as population data the BMC
coins from the 359 cities that could be
reached by land from Dura (to avoid
the noise generated by inclusion of two
modes of transport) from the first five
periods were grouped into 18 regions.
Twelve of the regions included the 353
cities outside Mesopotamia (Figure 1).
This was done to control for "negatives"
[11, p. 105] (cities that produced coins
but which were not represented at

Dura); while we know that Dura received coins from 58 cities in the region,
coins of 301 other cities were not found.
I have done city-by-city analysis elsewhere [4], but I now find it unsatisfactory; while between 17 and 55 cities
whose coins were found at Dura were
included in the analysis for each period,
upwards of 150 cities with interaction
values of zero were excluded. Their inclusion would have resulted in the specification of a variable with no variation
in the bulk of its cases, which violates
the assumptions of any analytical technique that I am aware of. I think that
the solution to the problem is that the
coins recovered should be thought of as
a sample of all of the coins that Dura
could have possibly received from a region rather than from the particular
cities whose coins were recovered there.
Dura also received a large number of
coins from its neighbor cities in Mesopotamia; "negatives" do not exist there,
so these cities can be treated as individual cases. Inclusion of individual cities
and large regions as cases in the same
data set might risk comparison of noncomparable items. I think that individual cities can be treated as small regions.
This is similar to studies of interstate
flows where small regions dominated by
a single city are included in the same
analysis with large multicity regions.
Disparity in size of regions is probably
more of a problem when the flows are
being measured by whether or not they
cross the boundaries of a set of interacting regions. In that situation large regions show fewer "migrations" than expected, because many trips can be completely contained within their boundaries [20]. In the present study only
the fact of a coin's arrival at Dura is being measured.
Once the two matrices representing
coins retrieved at Dura (Table 4) and
the holdings of the BMC (Table 5) were
assembled, 0.5 was added to each cell
of the BMC matrix where it had a zero
but there was a non-zero value in the

10

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Fig. 1.

Source regions and cities for coins found at Dura.

corresponding cell in the Dura matrix.


This was to avoid division by zero. Since
the data were to be converted to logs,
the zero values had to be dealt with.
Cells with zeros in both matrices were
ignored, for if there was no production
in a region during a period, there was
no possibility of interaction. However,
if no coins of a producing region were
recovered at Dura, this is real information, which cannot be ignored. To create

the interaction table (Table 6), data in


Table 5 were divided by corresponding
data in Table 6, and then one-half of the
minimum non-zero value of each row
was substituted for each zero in the new
matrix where there was a non-zero value
in the corresponding cell of the BMC
matrix. This gave a set of "zero" values
for each period that was constant and
lower than any of the other values.
A vector of distances (Table 6, top

TABLE 4
COINS

BY

AND

SOURCE

PERIOD

FOUND

AT

DURA

Source region
IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

10 B.C.-70 A.D.

229

17

70-150 A.D.

38

261

60

40

19

150-210 A.D.

10

1321

13

15

43

210-230 A.D.

12

533

64

26

230-253 A.D.

44

416

32

XII

II

Period

III

XIH

Source: Bellinger [1].

TABLE 5
COINS I

THE

BMC

BY REGION AND PERIOD

Region
I

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

10 B.C.-70 A.D.

361

243

23

58

57

74

70-150 A.D.

501

257

109

61

23

114

52

59

106

388

47

Period

II

150-210 A.D.

1173

485

207

107

25

22

42

40

123

27

191

43

210-230 A.D.

302

190

65

62

16

93

31

294

125

36

230-253 A.D.

488

502

29

214

42

51

10

59

25

174

19

Source: British Museum [3].

TABLE 6
DISTANCES

Region:
Distance (km.):

I
1217

II
927

HI
738

AND

INTERACTION

IV
570

VALUES

V
379

BETWEEN

VI

SOURCE

REGIONS

VII
450

442

AND

DURA

VIII
365

Interaction values:
10 B.C.-70 A.D.

.00554

.00277

.00277

.00277

3.948

.5

70-150 A.D.

.00258

.00258

.3486

.00258

.3478

2.290

1.154

.6818

150-210 A.D.

.00170

.0206

210-230 A.D.

.00263

.00526

.1077

.0645

.750

5.731

230-253 A.D.

.00199

.00398

.0690

.00936

1.048

8.157

Region:

13

14

15

16

17

Distance (km.):

819

279

6.382

319

.0280

239

.520

259

18

202

Interaction values:
10 B.C.-70 A.D.

70-150 A.D.
150-210 A.D.
210-230 A.D.
230-253 A.D.

1.0

at

2.0

5.625

6.548

.800

1.234

9.220

36.490

18.818

29.90

* Cells with zero values in both Tables 4 and 5.

5.667

25.40

.00263
1.125

25.40

.1429
2.064
.1250

.6780

.1

1.075

1.400

0.8

3.200

13

ARCHAEOLOGICAL
FLOWS

row) from the centroid of each source


region was measured from the map.
Since some regions are large there is
some possibility of error. I felt that this
was an acceptable trade-off for the reduction in the number of zeros in Table
4.
Since the bivariate scatter plots of the
distance and interaction data showed a
high degree of convexity to the origin, I
decided to run both single- and doublelog least squares regressions. The double-log model (often called the gravity
model) has the form:

log lij = a-b log Dij

(7)

This was done because this model probably fits the data more closely than the
single-log model, and it would also facilitate comparison of the present study
with those employing the gravity model.
RESULTS

The single-log distance decay gradients (Table 7) conform to the hypothesis. All of the Dura gradients are
smaller than all but one of those derived
by Hodder for stone tools and pottery.
However, the a values are strikingly different than what was expected from a
well-developed trading network. Four of
the five values are negative and none is
greater than one. This result was not
predicted by Renfrew's theory, although

the values are clearly not impossible.


They suggest a model of the form:

logI = a-bD

a
(8)

where a is negative.
This kind of model would fit a situation where interaction dropped off very
steeply near the source of an article but
a small number of them managed to
travel a great distance. This would be
characteristic of the circulation of national currencies, where the coins of a
particular country would be very common within its territory, drop off sharply
at the border, and then represented by
fewer and fewer strays carried by travelers as souvenirs farther away from the
border. Although we don't know how
people regarded the currency value of
these particular coins, it could have been
that either through government decree
or common practice only the coins of
certain nearby cities or regions were accepted as legal money and all others
were mere curiosities. The large issues
of Pontus (205-207 A.D.) which appear
in abundance at Dura and the large
number of coins of Gordian III (238244 A.D.) from Mesopotamian mints
which predominate in Dura's currency
at the very end of its existence are evidence that the Roman government
minted coins to circulate in certain regions. Coins apparently also had value
as souvenirs. A contingent of Spartan

TABLE 7
ALPHA

VALUES

AND

REGRESSION

RESULTS

OF SINGLE-

AND

DOUBLE-LOG

Single-log
Period

alpha

MODELS

Double-log
r2

10 B.C.-70 A.D.

-5.1

70-150 A.D.

- .7

1.041

-.00654

.368*

25.47

-4.494

.4150

150-210 A.D.

-1.6

1.894

-.00719

.342*

27.66

-4.789

.423*

210-230 A.D.

.6

2.375

-.00755

.394*

25.12

-4.336

.387*

230-253 A.D.

- .7

3.374

-.0102

.462*

37.23

-6.397

.590*

* Significant at 0.05 level.

.613

-.00617

.336

28.93

-5.041

.416*

14

ECONOMICGEOGRAPHY

soldiers brought to Dura by Caracalla


in 215 A.D. left at least 95 Peloponnesian coins that were found at Dura
[1, p. 207]. Apparently these soldiers
saw some reason to carry their own local
money that far.
This "bounded circulation" was not
anticipated by Renfrew, but this does
not discredit his ideas, it only means
that the situation is more complicated
than what he had envisioned. Objects
such as coins, to which special limited
values are attached by society, might
move in very different ways than those
which are traded on the basis of their
utility alone.
In addition to tests of the hypothesis
of the overall efficiency of the trade network, the Dura material can be used to
measure changes in the efficiency of
trade over time (Table 7). Only the
double-log gradient of the last period is
significantly different from any of the
others. This indicates a long period of
stable conditions of trade with a sharp
rise in its apparent difficulty at the end.
I think that there are three possible explanations for this steepening of the
gradient. One is that the political upheavals of the third century inhibited
trade and that the growing weakness of
the imperial government prevented it
from paying soldiers from distant
sources [1, p. 209]. Thus, the frontiers
of the Empire were increasingly dependent on local sources for their coinage.
The second explanation is that the rise
in the gradient reflects the speed of
movement of the coins. Crawford [6, p.
77] argues that a coin could travel long
distances within a year of its issue. This
might be useful for the dating of hoards;
knowing it for a certainty surely would,
but it's probably that each issue of coins
went through a cycle: first they were
found only near the source, but as time
passed the standard radius of their distribution increased and they became increasingly common in places far from
their source. After a longer period, the
coins either wore out, were lost, melted

down, or de-monetized, becoming increasingly rare. If we know the final date


at which a site was occupied (as we do
at Dura), the closer in time to that date
that a coin was made, the less time it
had to reach Dura before the city was
abandoned. In the case of the most recent coins, there would only be large
numbers of those produced at the nearest mints, but successively earlier issues
would show wider distributions of
sources. Thus, we would expect the distance decay gradients to get progressively steeper toward the end of the
site's occupation. The third possibility is
that the Roman government might have
decided to supply the frontier with coins
from mints in the nearby Mesopotamian
cities [1, pp. 207-8].
In an attempt to unravel this problem,
the last 50 years of Dura's existence were
examined in greater detail (Figure 2,
Table 8). The gradients do not conform
to the expectations (dotted line) of the
circulation hypothesis. The peak, ca. 240,
could be the result of the presence of
large numbers of coins of Gordian III
(238-244 A.D.) found at Dura that were
minted at nearby cities, which might
have made the regression line steeper
than it otherwise would have been. This
tends to reinforce the "government decision" hypothesis. Since there is no
clear pattern to indicate that the steeper
gradient was the result of the speed of
circulation, it is more likely that the
change was caused either by worsening
economic conditions or by Roman monetary policies.
CONCLUSION

Perhaps more questions have been


raised than answers given here, but at
least two things are clear: that the distance decay gradient appears to work
well to determine how efficiently goods
were moving and that Renfrew's theories
need further elaboration before they will
fit much of the available data.
The distance decay gradients fall into

15

ARCHAEOLOGICALFLOWS
-..............

*
O

Single-Log 's
Double-Log b's
Circulation hypothesis
Significant observation
Non-Significant Observation

.010

.008
a)

0
(a)

g) .006

-J
0)

N1%

.004

.002

0205

210

220

0
250

240
DATE (A.D.)

Fig. 2. Single- and double-log distance decay slopes for coins found at Dura, 205-250
The dotted line represents the pattern expected in the speed of circulation hypothesis.

A.D.

TABLE 8
REGRESSIONS

FOR THIRD

CENTURY

Single-Log

Double-Log

Dates
(A.D.)

Septimius Severus
and Family

193-217

1.538

-.00651

.8010

25.37

-4.42

.386*

Macrinus through
Elagabalus

217-222

.942

-.00391

.275*

12.24

-2.17

.252*

Coins of:

Severus Alexander

222-235

1.149

-.00642

.268

22.88

-4.08

.326*

Maximinus and
Gordian III

235-244

2.939

-.00929

.452*

34.96

-6.03

.628*

Philip through
Trebonnianus Gallus

244-253

1.301

-.00600

.368*

23.19

-4.06

.484*

* Significant at the 0.05 level.

16

ECONOMICGEOGRAPHY

a pattern that is reasonable in light of


the history of the Roman Empire. Also
they can be used to help distinguish
what the cause of a particular change
might be. In this case, the speed of circulation was not likely to have been the
cause of the steepening gradient of the
mid-third century, which means that
coins probably moved fairly rapidly.
Thus, two hypotheses are left as possibilities: that government monetary policies or worsening conditions of trade
acted to steepen the gradient.
The a values derived here do not fit
Renfrew's theory, yet they do fit into a
plausible scheme, that of exchange over
a boundary. Within the boundary, the
goods have a special cultural status, in
the case of these coins a monetary value
greater than the intrinsic value of the
metal they contain. Outside the boundary, their value is less, so there was
probably a tendency to send them back
into the area where they had monetary
value. Certainly, modern money works
this way. Also, there are many things
beside money that have value in specific
cultures, whether they are objects used
in religious ceremonies or tools that are
useful in some economies, but not in
others. A set of theories that explains
cultural evolution through the movement of goods should cover situations
where certain classes of goods have culture-specific value.
I should stress that these conclusions
are only as firm as the data that they
rest upon. Those used here have been
stretched about to their limit. For instance, it would have been desirable to
have finer divisions of time in the first
and second centuries, but when this was
attempted the abundance of zeros in the
data made any meaningful analysis impossible. Larger data sets are now available; particularly promising is the Inventory

of

Greek

Coin

Hoards

[32]

which lists approximately 2,400 coin


hoards deposited between 600 and 30
B.C., representing the issues of over 600
mints. Analysis of this material is under

way, and hopefully firmer conclusions


can be drawn from it.
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