By analyzing sediment cores taken from six sites in southern Greece, an international team of researchers identified trends in cereal, olive, and grapevine production indicating major changes in agricultural production between 1000 BC and 600 AD, according to greekreporter.com.
These changes mean that Ancient Greece had a market economy that responded to the law of supply and demand fully three thousand years earlier than had been previously thought. This would again make Greece the location of another first in the world — the first market economy on the globe.
This also means that Greece had a relatively sophisticated market system as far back as 2,600 years ago, even before Athens became a democracy under the famous statesman Pericles.
Instead of simply eking out a living by planting whatever the local villages wanted and desired, farmers as far back as the Archaic era were already planning their crops according to the needs of international trade. This means that separate individual markets for a consumer good would become merged with others to form one big market, aimed at large-scale trading.
Adam Izdebski of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues, in a paper published in the November edition of The Economic Journal of Oxford University Press, are noting that this is proof that a true market economy existed in that era.
It has long been known that trade existed between groups of people as far back as the Neolithic era before man had invented the wheel or even domesticated horses. And the concept of money and even counterfeiting was extant as far back as those times.
But now, researchers have combined varying fields of scientific research to provide evidence for a market economy in ancient Greece — even including areas around the Black Sea where Greeks had settled — characterized by integrated agricultural production and a great expansion of trade.
As a matter of fact, the researchers state, the closer the farmers were to the Black Sea, the more marked this effect was. These people were already acutely reliant on importing grains, in exchange for which they would export olive oil and wine.
Read the full report here.
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