The baazar side of the Indus Valley: a framework for understanding the merchant economy of the Indus Valley culture.

Summary

The craft industries and trade networks of the Indus Valley are perhaps some of the most well understood and explored aspects of this early South Asian civilization. While the nature of production and spatial distribution of certain commodities are known, it is still uncertain within what form of economic structures these exchanges transpired. This paper proposes that the "bazaar" might provide a suitable framework through which to understand the exchange of these commodities. While bazaars often invoke images of the exotic and the chaotic, these conceptions overlook the structures and values organizing this type of marketplace. Drawing on research of both contemporary and historical bazaars, this paper show how our current knowledge of Indus Valley sites and certain categories of archaeological evidence such as standardized weights, the Indus script, or various commodities support the existence of a bazaar economy within this culture. Not only could this further our understanding of the marketplace within the core Indus region, but could also lead to a better understanding of how bazaars connected local communities and merchants to larger economic networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage