Crafting Values in Chalcolithic Cyprus and Anatolia

Bleda S Düring

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_5

Abstract

In the Chalcolithic of Cyprus and Anatolia, we can document the emergence of exchange networks that were centred on highly standardized craft products. These exchange systems, organized around figurative items crafted from stone, set the stage for the later development of long-distance exchange networks of ‘prestige goods’ made from metals and gemstones of often distant provenance. This earliest exchange of figurative stone objects, which occurred in egalitarian societies, remains poorly investigated. Why were such objects considered desirable in the first place? How can we understand the rise of the shared regimes of value that they objectify? In this paper, I will present some first ideas to understand this problem in relation to anthropological studies on value, and I will argue that the initial creation of value was rooted in shared cultural repertoires of craftsmanship.

Highlights

When it comes to the study of economic systems of the past, archaeology faces an important challenge
Recent scholarship abounds with studies suggesting that today’s economic principles were pertinent to the deep past. Scholars such as Graeber (2011), Scott (2017) and Scheidel (2017) have recently reconstructed Bronze Age Mesopotamian economies as being not dissimilar to contemporary economic systems: having class societies, private property and exploitation and enslavement of workers by elites and state institutions. They pushed the emergence of private property and competition over scarce resources back into the Neolithic, a view that is held by some colleagues in archaeology (Mattison et al, 2016)
In the Philia and Cruciform exchange networks, we see that craftsmanship is important in that the limits of what was possible in stone production were deliberately pushed

Summary

Introduction

When it comes to the study of economic systems of the past, archaeology faces an important challenge. In the Later Neolithic and Chalcolithic (sixth and fifth millennia BCE) we see much less evidence for exchange networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as an increasing fragmentation of cultural traditions in Asia Minor and Cyprus (but a very different trajectory occurs in Mesopotamia, with the rise of the Halaf and the Ubaid) (Düring, 2013).

Results

Conclusion