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Chapter Five - Rethinking the Prestige Economy and Its Role in Trade and Exchange

The Dominance Economy in Contact-Era New Guinea

from Part I - Exchange and Social Evolution: Forms of Trade in Egalitarian, Transegalitarian, and Chiefdom Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2022

Johan Ling
Affiliation:
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Richard J. Chacon
Affiliation:
Winhrop University, South Carolina
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Summary

Archaeological discussions commonly link the trade and exchange of precious metals, shells, feathers, and other exotics to the demands of a prestige-goods economy (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1978; Earle 1987: 294–297; Hayden 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Earle and Spriggs 2015). These claims are sometimes challenged, both at a general (Barrett 2012) and specific level (Kienlin 2015), but attempts to investigate them run into serious difficulties because so many dimensions of prehistoric prestige economies are archaeologically invisible. Some of the goods traded and transacted in these economies are durable enough to survive in the material record, but others are not, and much about the political, social, religious, and aesthetic contexts that gave them social force and meaning were insubstantial or transient and are now beyond recovery.

Type
Chapter
Information
Trade before Civilization
Long Distance Exchange and the Rise of Social Complexity
, pp. 75 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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