The main goal of this volume is to look at social groups involved
in economic activity other than members of the palace-based
institutions and “elites” in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek societies.
The palaces and elites are the usual subject of studies of ancient
economies, often from a top-down approach, but here we consider a fuller
range of the members of a society, their organization, their
institutions, and their contributions to the economies of those
societies from bottom-up approaches.
The traditional model of a highly centralized, redistributive based
economy controlled by a palace and its officials is no longer viable.
Non-palatial components, institutions, and individuals and how those
might be organized are increasingly recognized as major components in
economic activity in the Mycenaean world. In this volume we examine the
various scales and of actors and institutions in Mycenaean economic
activities outside palatial control, including the individual, the
household, larger groups such as House societies, and markets. The
possibility of Firms in the institutional economic sense is also
addressed.
In addition to theoretical and methodological chapters, we present
several case studies involving craft production, especially of ceramics.
The results of these case studies show how economic organization in the
Mycenaean world varies greatly in scale, independence of palatial
control, and adaption and resilience to change.
The papers in this volume demonstrate that the economy in Mycenaean
states was a complex web of institutions, organizations, and actors, and
invites closer comparison to the economy in other ancient and archaic
states.
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