Bachhuber/Citadel and Cemetery, 7. Connectivity and Refinement on Citadels

Chapter 7 begins with a reassessment of the significance of trade, with an ultimate concern that the over-prioritization of evidence for ‘trade’ in the literature has distorted the significance of relevant objects and assemblages. The motivations to trade have been hardly considered. The discussion engages an actor-based approach by examining the benefits and the risks of an increasingly disproportionate investment in long-distance exchange networks. Chapter 7 places particular emphasis on relationships between the inhabitants of citadels that were mediated by gift-giving. This was one aspect of a ‘network strategy’ between exclusionary social elites, whose elevated and potentially vulnerable status required maintaining social and political relationships beyond a local and mundane sphere of socio-economic interaction.