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Friday Seminar: David Wengrow

by eric — last modified April 05, 2010 10:48 AM
What Friday Seminar
When April 09, 2010
from 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm
Where A222 Fowler Building
Contact Name Seppi Lehner
Contact Email
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What can we learn from monsters? Cognitive Anthropology and the
Bronze Age

Dr David Wengrow, Reader in Comparative Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College London


How far is the human mind conditioned to produce and transmit certain kinds of religious representations? How do cultural representations of supernatural agents spread within human populations? These questions are currently the subject of a dialogue between cognitive psychology and evolutionary anthropology, based largely upon laboratory experimentation and comparative ethnography. But they also raise vital issues for the interpretation of images in the archaeological record. David Wengrow will present examples of his ongoing research into the empirical distribution of supernatural imagery in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, in order to suggest how archaeology might offer new perspectives on the problems at hand.

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The Construction of Value

Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value was created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world. Based on the basic premise that value is a social construct defined by the cultural context in which it is situated, the volume explores four overarching but closely interrelated themes: place value, body value, object value, and number value. The questions raised and addressed are of central importance to archaeologists studying ancient civilizations: How can we understand the value that might have been accorded to materials, objects, people, places, and patterns of action by those who produced or used the things that compose the human material record? Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate how the concept of value lies at the intersection of individual and collective tastes, desires, sentiments, and attitudes that inform the ways people select, or give priority to, one thing over another.

Available now!

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