ALICE YAO

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

Control over copper and tin ores are often considered to be significant drivers of wealth production and political stratification in early states. This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in China. A view from the frontier region in highland southwest China, among peer polities known as the Dian and Mimo Kingdoms of the first millennium BC, finds that metal ores are but only one piece of the political economy puzzle. This talk examines the prospects of thinking about an archaeology of finance by thinking about other sources of value in a Bronze Age economics. Can we use finance, credit, and risk as generalizable categories in the absence of markets and money? Combining recent archaeological findings and a “return” to classic ethnographic studies of Highland Southeast Asia, I outline some of the empirical problems of this approach to value production.