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Friday Seminar: Richard Redding

by eric — last modified October 25, 2010 03:49 PM
What Friday Seminar
When December 03, 2010
from 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm
Where A 222 Fowler
Contact Name Lana Martin
Contact Email
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A Tale of Two Sites:  Old Kingdom Subsistence Economy and Infrastructure of Pyramid Construction

By Richard W. Redding, Curator of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology

 

The faunal and floral remains from the Workers' Town of Menkaure at Giza and the Delta site of Kom el-Hisn provide a glimpse into the infrastructure that supported pyramid construction. The residents of Kom el-Hisn produced cattle and sheep/goats for the central authority.  The residents of the Workers' Town were primarily provisioned and not involved in subsistence activities.

The subsistence strategies/tactics employed at Kom el-Hisn could not have been understood without a synthesis of the faunal and floral data. While at Giza the story is the variation in the diet that seems to be related to status.  Not surprisingly, higher status individuals had preferential access to wild resources and preferred species.  What was surprising was that we were able to detect complexity in the use of high status animals.

Part of the Fall 2010 series "Food for Thought: The Archaeology of Diet and Subsistence." Guest scholars explore approaches to and methods of investigating the foodways of past human societies.

 

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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.

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