Luxury goods have existed for as long as people have seen something and wanted it. In the Americas we see exotic items being sought after, things like obsidian, marine shells, and copper all were exchanged through networks stretching across North America. Nonlocal materials seem to have also had a preference. I worked on a project that looked at why materials were used in projectile point construction, and one thing I found was that a more colorful material may have been used due to its unique color scheme when compared to the local cherts. Basically people see something and want it, whether it is copper adornments or a blueish rock.

I am not sure if we could even locate when luxury goods began being exchanged. The issue also is that what do we define as a luxury good? To a certain extent it is entirely culturally defined, what we place value on may appear to be worthless to someone else. A good start would be to look at outliers, if all the statues at a site are ceramic and suddenly we see one carved from ivory from the same time period, we can begin to infer that maybe something about that material may have been a higher valued good.

Yet another issue is putting our own economic systems on cultures who may not have functioned in that sense. We take the process of exchanging currency or other valuables for items to be the process of obtaining a luxury good, but that is far from the standard means of obtaining goods. Look at the potlachs of the pacific northwest or the 'kula' in amongst the trobriand islanders. Both are forms of resource exchange that rely on culturally dictated processes of exchange, the items still hold value but the currency is less physical and more culturally derived. The items are still valuable, but in a way that is different than how we might view luxury goods in our own culture. The value you can expect to pay for a luxury good may be in assiting the owner with a harvest the next fall, or in who you may look to for a marriage in the future. Those are not items that can really be resold, and thus the process of resource exchange is much more focused on the social ties between the parties.

Exchange can happen in a lot of different ways, but it centers on the idea that someone wants something someone else has. This has been happening for as long as we have been human, and thus cannot be pin pointed to a single moment in history.