The Economy of Metal and Shell Wealth Goods

Abstract

The most obvious markers of social status in most cultures are material goods. To understand who has which goods and how they move through a society is to understand a great deal about that society’s socioeconomic structure and the strategies used by individuals and institutions to manipulate the system of goods and status for their own ends. Often the most telling goods are those that concentrate considerable value in a durable, portable object. These “portable wealth goods’’ are key elements in the socioeconomic game, because in comparison to food staples, buildings, people, or other more substantial goods, they are easily stored, displayed, and distributed. This study reconstructs aspects of the economy of metal and shell wealth goods among the Xauxa of the Yanamarca Valley, Peru, and how it changed when the Xauxa were conquered and subsumed into the Inka empire. The archaeological data show that metal and shell goods were valued, and even suggest a relative ordering of the values of materials and forms. The study evaluates competing models of the functions of wealth goods under the Inka and suggests some strategies that were used by the Inka state and the local Xauxa elites as they negotiated power and control in the Yanamarca Valley. Portable wealth goods can be more carefully defined as objects that store value and are easily exchanged. An object stores value when it is durable, it is the product of expending scarce resources such as rare or imported materials, or skilled or gross labor, and it is in demand; that is, people are willing to expend the resources necessary to secure it. These criteria are matters of degree. There will always be extreme cases such as the scarcely portable millstone-sized “coins” of Yap (Beauclair, 1963) or the perishable bulbs of the Dutch tulipmania (Garber, 1989) that nevertheless can reasonably be treated as portable wealth goods with interesting aberrations. For similar and fuller definitions, see Earle’s (1982) “primitive valuables,” Haselgrove’s (1982) “prestige goods,” and their citations. The demand for a wealth good depends upon its function in the broadest sense. An object’s function can be practical, or technomic, in Binford’s (1962) terms, as in the case of a bronze chisel. If bronze, bronze-working labor, or their equivalents in exchange are scarce resources that people are willing to expend in order to get bronze chisels, then bronze chisels are wealth goods. An object’s function can also be social, or sociotechnic (Binford, 1962).