In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface, by Hans P. Hahn and Geraldine Schmitz
• 1. Introduction. Markets as places: Actors, structures and ideologies: Hans P. Hahn
• Part I: Archaeological approaches
  • 2. Of middens and markets: The phenomenology of the market place in the Bronze Age and beyond: Lorenz Rahmstorf
  • 3. Beyond the market: Reflections on the archaeological remains of exchange processes: Laura Picht
  • 4. Dealing with the foreign: The movement of artifacts and values in Bronze Age Europe: Lukas Wiggering
  • 5. Crates and crates of sigillata? The supply of Italic terra sigillata to Roman military camps: Thomas Hahn
  • 6. Built space and consuming place: Archaeological research on a medieval market in Tulln, Lower Austria: Ute Scholz
  • 7. The impact of the kula on archaeological interpretation: The case of Lapita shell ornaments: Katherine Szabó
• Part II: Anthropological and historical approaches
  • 8. Markets in West Africa: Karl Polanyi, or what sort of social formation: Mahir Şaul
  • 9. Market thinking: Perspectives from Saharan and Atlantic West Africa: Ann B. Stahl
  • 10. An economy between the markets: The case of the central market in Tamale, northern Ghana: Geraldine Schmitz
  • 11. The walking cartographies of the marketplaces of Surat: Nishpriha Thakur
  • 12. Direct sales in the Amazon: Precariously mediating regimes of value: Jessica Chelekis
  • 13. Tourists on the Nasara: The ritual ground as a space for commodification in Vanuatu, southwest Pacific: Hugo DeBlock
  • 14. ‘It was harder before; we lived by the market’: Hopes and fears of a market-free future in East New Britain: Keir Martin