Interpreting the axe trade

While earlier approaches focused on efficiency and evolutionary schema in a commodified vision of production, Bradley and Edmonds (1993) attempt to take a middle road where they use measures of efficiency and investment observed in workshop contexts in a heuristic manner, but they principally base their interpretations of production on the changing socio-political context of the larger consumption zone. They consider artifacts in terms of dichotomies that probably existed in some form, dividing the circulation of inalienable gifts from alienable commodity production. They seek to consider the implications of gifts in the theoretical terms that relate gift-giving and status acquisition with the political strategizing of elites in Neolithic Britain. Further, they consider the "regimes of value" where gifts and commodities circulate and are assigned value that is a construction of political contexts and not merely a reflection of measurable costs using the concepts of social distance borrowed from Sahlins. Finally, Bradley and Edmonds consider the circulation of axes as wealth goods and the ways in which elites may influence the specialized production of axes (Brumfiel and Earle 1987) and the circulation and consumption in a peer polity situation (Renfrew and Cherry 1986) or through control of deposition (Kristiansen 1984). Ironically, while neoevolutionist approaches are explicitly rejected, one is left with the question: what is theoretically significant about changes observed in the circulation of axes if not the link to evolutionary changes in socio-political organization? In both Edmonds (1990: 66-67) and Bradley and Edmonds (1993), evolutionary explanations are avoided in the analysis of production, but in regional exchange the changes observed attributed to increasing levels of social ranking as indicated by competition over exchange networks and specialized knowledge during the Later Neolithic.