This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Did brands exist before modern society, in noncapitalist economies? An international team led by Marta Luciani of the University of Vienna has made unexpected discoveries about Bronze Age trade: Yes, brands did indeed exist 3,200 years ago.
Findings from the oasis of Qurayyah in northwestern Arabia offer unprecedented insights into the production of two-color painted pottery. The researchers demonstrated that the vessels were so distinctive, appealing and sought-after that, for all intents and purposes, they must be considered a "brand." The results were recently published in the journal PLOS ONE. The team included members of M.I.T., the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, OeAI/OeAW, TU Wien and the University of Sydney, with support from the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture.
An international team led by Luciani of the University of Vienna, in collaboration with Pamela Fragnoli (OeAI/OeAW) and Johannes H. Sterba (TU Wien), analyzed several dozen Bronze Age pottery vessels from the oasis of Qurayyah in northwestern Arabia. The researchers were able to dispel old misconceptions about the famous "Midianite Pottery" and, for the first time, prove that the pottery's origin was the oasis of Qurayyah.
"Our discovery sheds light on how, even in the arid environment of desert oases, where essential resources such as clay, water and fuel were scarce, local communities in the Bronze Age were far from marginal but participated in wider networks of technological know-how shared with neighboring regions, such as the Southern Levant and Syria. Oasis dwellers were resourceful and inventive enough to create their own ceramic repertoire, to cherish at home and eventually export abroad," says Luciani, study lead and a member of the Department of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. Key to this pioneering research was determining the criteria necessary to identify ancient brands: visual identity, material consistency, technological continuity, centralized production, export circulation, local imitation, intentional commercial scope and cultural reputation.
"Thus, our study's implications stretch beyond archaeology and the long-term relationship between humans and natural resources in climatically extreme regions into fields such as the economic mechanisms mediating producer-consumer relationships across time and space," adds Luciani, an archaeologist and team leader at the Human Evolution and Archaeological Science (HEAS) network at the University of Vienna. "Decisive for this discovery was our interdisciplinary and multiscalar approach, combining examination of stratified material, vessel-shaping technology and petrographic analysis of ceramic thin sections under the polarizing microscope," explains Fragnoli, head of the Ceramic Lab of the Austrian Archaeological Institute at the Austrian Academy of Science (OeAI/OeAW). "This was cross-checked with chemical fingerprinting of the vessels' composition, down to their trace elements obtained via Neutron Activation Analysis," adds Sterba, head of the Center for Labelling and Isotope Production at TU Wien.
Doralice Klainscek, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna and study co-author, specifies, "The first set of Qurayyah Painted Ware was produced 3,600 years ago. Our most striking discovery was ascertaining that painted pottery production continued by constantly evolving. "Four centuries later, ca. 3,200 years ago, potters manufactured a flourishing repertoire of painted animals and human rituals.
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