Archaeology as Global Public Good and Local Identity Good

Abstract

For more than a half century, anthropologists have looked askance, and many have rejected outright, the economic models that are commonly presented in microeconomic textbooks. As an alternate to these formalist models, which are employed by economists themselves, a substantivist model was devised by a set of anthropologists. These became the basis for what has since been known as economic anthropology. Economics in the substantivist model is broadly focused on exchange, which in pre-capitalist societies typically did not involve currency, and the network of obligations reinforced or established by exchange. The globalized world of the twenty-first century, however, has enmeshed all societies in capitalism, and has rendered culture itself, in all of its forms, a commodity. Many forms of culture are endangered by unregulated trade in the marketplace, among them material culture, and, more specifically, archaeological materials. When commercial activities destroy or take from the context in which they were deposited archaeological materials, the scientific and historic knowledge that might have been gained from systematic, scientific analysis of those materials is lost forever. In this chapter, a formalist economic analysis is conducted in order to better identify threats to the archaeological record that arise in the global marketplace, and to argue for the use of archaeological materials to produce global public goods in ways that will stimulate the public support that is, ultimately, essential to the preservation of the archaeological record.