The Construction of Value in the Ancient World (Costen Advanced Seminar)

Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. John K. Papadopoulos and Gary Urton's The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value is created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world. Based on the basic premise that the concept of value is a social construct that is defined by the cultural context in which it is situated, the volume explores four overarching but closely interrelated themes: place value, body value, object value, and what the editors have termed as number value. The questions raised and addressed throughout the volume are of central importance to archaeologists studying ancient civilizations: How can we understand the value that might have been accorded to materials, objects, people, places, and patterns of action by those who produced or used the things that compose the human material record? What do we know about how objects were valued in the past, whether, for example, in the pre-industrial market or pre-market economies of the Mediterranean, or the "non-market" contexts of Oceania and the Pre-Columbian Andean societies? Why were certain materials valued by people in many different parts of the world over other materials? What qualities of physical substances were at the heart of how cultures determined, negotiated and on occasion sanctioned value? Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate how the concept of value lies at the intersection of individual and collective tastes, desires, sentiments, and attitudes that inform the ways people select, or give priority to, one thing over another.