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R. E. Taylor

PROFESSOR

Ph.D., Anthropology, UCLA, 1970

Office: COSTEN INST OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Phone: 3102068934
Fax: 310-206-4723
E-mail: retaylor@ucr.edu

Mailing Address:

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
308 Charles E Young Dr. North
A210 Fowler Building/Box 951510
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1510

Class Websites

Position and Home Institution

Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside; Visiting Scientist, Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine

Research Interests

Archaeometry; Radiocarbon dating; Peopling of the New World; Western North America, Mesoamerica

Research Summary

R. E. Taylor received his Ph.D. at UCLA in Anthropology (1970) undertaking his dissertation research in the Isotope Laboratory of Willard F. Libby, 1960 Nobel laureate in chemistry for the development of the radiocarbon dating method. Taylor was a NSF postdoctoral fellow at UCLA in chemistry in the laboratory of Daniel Kivelson. He directed the Radiocarbon Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Riverside from 1973 to 2003. He retired from UCR as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology in 2005. He was chairman of his department from 1993 to 2000. He served as the president and General Secretary of the Society for Archaeological Sciences and received the 2004 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research from the Society for American Archaeology.

Photo: R. E. Taylor at Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometer, University of California, Irvine where he is a visiting scientist in the laboratory of Ellen Druffel, John Southon, and Susan Trumbore. Photograph courtesy of Guaciara Santos.


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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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