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4. Prestige-Goods Economies: The Prehistoric Aegean and Modern Northern Highland Albania Compared


 
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1. Title Title of document 4. Prestige-Goods Economies: The Prehistoric Aegean and Modern Northern Highland Albania Compared - Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Michael Galaty; University of Michigan; United States
 
3. Subject Discipline(s) Archaeology
 
4. Subject Keyword(s) John F. Cherry; Aegean archology; Mediterranean archaeology; Albania; Ottoman Empire; Minoan and Mycenaean Greece and Egypt; trade; prestige goods
 
5. Subject Subject classification archaeology
 
6. Description Abstract This paper employs the prestige-goods network in modern highland northern Albania — focusing on interactions between local ‘tribal’ groups and the Ottoman empire — as a comparative analogy for investigating the trade in prestige goods between Minoan and Mycenaean Greece and Egypt. Various goods were acquired by Albanian mountaineers in Ottoman market towns and shared within and between households. Exchanges of such goods were governed by customary laws related to reciprocal hospitality and honor (nder). Thus there was an ideological component to the trade in and use of prestige goods, but the symbolic meanings they held in Ottoman culture were not necessarily those they held in Albanian tribal culture. Ottoman authorities allowed, even encouraged, mountain trade, but the independent Albanian state, in its effort to destroy the mountain tribes and their chieftains, closed borders, restricting access to market towns, and thereby disrupted the prestige-goods economy. Without access to prestige goods, systems of reciprocal hospitality (and therefore economy) faltered. The role of prestige-goods in the operation and then collapse of tribal social systems was not techno-functional; it was ideological, framed in emic terms by mountaineers as a failure of honor. This paper suggests, based on a contextual analysis of Egyptian items imported to Late Bronze Age Greece, that Mycenaean (but not Minoan) society may have relied on ideological systems that were similar to those of the modern Albanian tribes. This paper highlights the importance of analogy to the study of prehistoric states.
 
7. Publisher Organizing agency, location Equinox Publishing Ltd
 
8. Contributor Sponsor(s)
 
9. Date (YYYY-MM-DD) 01-Jan-2018
 
10. Type Status & genre Peer-reviewed Article
 
11. Type Type
 
12. Format File format PDF
 
13. Identifier Uniform Resource Identifier https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/books/article/view/30801
 
14. Identifier Digital Object Identifier 10.1558/equinox.30801
 
15. Source Journal/conference title; vol., no. (year) Equinox eBooks Publishing; Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity
 
16. Language English=en en
 
18. Coverage Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.)
 
19. Rights Copyright and permissions Copyright 2014 Equinox Publishing Ltd