At the entrance to this impressive exhibition stands Umberto Boccioni's dramatic bronze sculpture, Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), a Futurist piece filled with power, movement and innovation. It is a fitting introduction to what follows.

Following a time in which dating through the radiocarbon method seemed to take a back seat, recent decades have seen an uptake again. This is due to new technologies used in sample analysis and the new-found ability to combine radiocarbon data with archaeological information via Bayesian statistics, a method devised and developed largely by experts from the United Kingdom. This methodology is now used by most researchers with the purpose of establishing a thorough chronology in archaeology (Bayliss 2015: 677–80).

The dominance of economics in shaping the modern world has encouraged scholars from diverse intellectual backgrounds to explore and interpret the evidence for exchange, merchants and markets in the distant past. Urban, state and pan-continental trade systems and networks were developed and in use for thousands of years before the emergence of coins in the early first millennium BC in Anatolia, India and China. In the absence of coins, there is at least some reassuring evidence—especially for historians and economists—when written records detailing goods and transactions are discovered and translated. However, while these sources are invaluable, the majority of the early trade and exchange between individuals and groups across the world is visible only in the archaeological record. The sheer scale, complexity and distances revealed, even for some small village-based agricultural groups, highlights that there was widespread co-operation, but also raises the question of how such exchanges could have occurred. It is in this space that the frequently neglected—and sometimes maligned—study of early metrological systems and weight use can be best appreciated.