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In this article, we address the historical question of why Aegean Bronze Age economies are characterized as redistributive systems and whether it is appropriate to continue to describe them as such. We argue that characterizing the political economies of the Aegean as redistributive is inacctlrate and misleading. Instead, we suggest it is more fruitful to describe how specific prehistoric social institutions were used to organize and allocate goods and services and thereby to study how political and economic systems interacted with one another. By examining how Aegean social institutions were constituted and changed over time, we will be in a position to use the prehistoric Aegean to develop and refine general models of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of a paper discussed during the 1993 Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting. Comparison of the results of archaeometry and traditional archaeology in the analysis of ancient economic systems in the Mediterranean.