ECONOMIC SPECIALIZATION IN ANCIENT AND PREMODERN SOCIETIES

Specialization characterizes all economies to some degree, but its variation is profound, and an objective of economic theory has been to explain its development. Since Adam Smith, economic specialization has been a focus of social scientific inquiry into the evolution of sociopolitical-economic complexity. In the words of Henrich and Boyd (2008:715), “Anthropologists and sociologists … have defended a wide variety of theories that link economic specialization, a division of labor, and the emergence of socially stratified inequality since the birth of their discipline at the end of the 19th century.” Archaeological inquiry, however, compels us to rethink this simple correlation. As the flip-side to self-sufficiency (Chapter 3), we examine variation in economic specialization found in thirteen ancient, premodern, or small-scale economies across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Our analysis looks at the nature, type, and scale of specialization found in societies of different sizes and internal complexity. This is followed by a discussion of production, distribution, and infrastructural/service specializations, and where they occur within the thirteen societies examined. Although specialization apparently has different causes related to efficiency, it links strongly to developing markets with their expanded access to demand.