People
Economy as part of archaeology – When someone asks me what I work with, I reply that I study prehistoric economic systems. How do I do that? Economics is not about ideas, but about tangible things: people working, things being produced, the exchange of goods. No subject is as suitable for archaeological study as economics, except possibly DNA research. This is how Timothy Earle explained the subject at the Felix Neubergh lecture in mid-October.
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GUJOURNAL NOVEMBER 2021
Economics is about seeking answers to the question “How?”, said Timothy Earle, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Northwestern University, USA. – How do you get people to give up their personal freedom to build, for example, the temples, fortresses, terraced slopes, roads and aqueducts for which the Inca Empire is so famous? The answer is the staple economy, a commodity export-oriented economy. The empire had conquered a lot of land from vanquished territory, but gave the defeated population the opportunity to work the land in order to earn a living. In return, they were hired as labour for the various construction projects undertaken by the Inca Empire. Since the prosperity of the Inca Em-
pire was not based on trade with distant lands but on domestic production, there are not many prestigious objects from that period on display in museums, not even in Peru.
However, it is a completely different ex-
perience visiting the National Museum in Copenhagen. The amount of objects from the Danish Bronze Age is overwhelming, Timothy Earle explained. Scandinavia, with its low population density, had a different kind of economy. It was based on trade in valuables, which is easier to control the further the goods are transported, and the more exotic they are perceived to be the more highly valued they are. Loyalty was created through gifts. The typical example is the
