Why are some things valuable while others are not? How much effort does it take to produce valuable objects? How can one explain the different appraisal of certain things in different temporal horizons and in different cultures? Cultural processes on how value is attached to things, and how value is re-established, are still little understood. The case studies in this volume, originating from anthropology and archaeology, provide innovative and differentiated answers to these questions. However, for all contributions there are some common basic assumptions. One of these concerns the understanding that it is rarely the value of the material itself that matters for high valuation, but rather the appreciation of the (assumed or constructed) origin of certain objects or their connection with certain social structures. A second of these shared insights addresses the ubiquity of phenomena of 'value in things'. There is no society without valued objects. As a rule, valuation is something negotiated or even disputed. Value arises through social action, whereby it is always necessary to ask anew which actors are interested in the value of certain objects (or in their appreciation). This also works the other way round: Who are those actors who question corresponding objective values and why?

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Values and value
  • 1. Introduction to Part I: Values and value: some approaches to the concept of ‘values in things’
  • 2. Learning new styles, quickly: an examination of the Mittani–middle Assyrian transition in material culture
  • 3. Changing exchange values in Solomon Islands
  • 4. Objects with (a) history: observations on reworking and re-using ancient bronzes
  • 5. The value of things: textiles in the Iron Age
  • 6. Negotiating the value of ethnographic cultural heritage: between scholarship, entertainment, sentimentality and nationalism
  • 7. The gift as an open question
• Part II: Re-evaluations
  • 8. Introduction to Part II: Re-evaluations
  • 9. Recycling Egypt? The phenomenon of secondary re-use of Egyptian imports in the Northern Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE
  • 10. Beyond the bones: relics in Greek temples
  • 11. The ‘Altar of the Emperors’ from Carnuntum
  • 12. How do materials matter?
  • 13. From antiquities to art: why has classical archaeology ignored Marcel Duchamp?
  • 14. When secondary is primary: on Halbzeug and other objects of continual re-evaluation