Cash Cow: Transitional economies challenging hybridity in late prehistoric-early Medieval Ireland
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-20

The effects of cultural contact can permeate all parts of society apart from material manufacture. Particularly, regional trade relations can impact the development of local economies. How, then, might we interpret the cause of economic change and development archaeologically? It has been suggested that the dairying economy so integral to Irish early Medieval society developed from contact with the Roman Empire as part of a suite of practices that developed during the first half of the first millennium AD. During the early Medieval period, cattle are the most prevalent remains identifiable at archaeological sites, and law tracts from this period suggest that property and personal values were measured in numbers of milk cows and pounds of butter. What amount of intimacy or what nature of contact would be necessary, therefore, for a society to develop such a complex value system? By examining economic change and development in archaeological contexts, this paper will propose ways in which we may better understand the network of social interactions that may lead to economic changes and questions how we explain the interconnections between social and economic interactions. 

Erin Crowley (University of Minnesota)