To separate the act from the thing [electronic resource] : technologies of value in the ancient Mediterranean
Keywords: Classics

This dissertation examines the role of economic instruments--measures, writing, and coins--in shaping the conception and manipulation of value in the ancient Mediterranean. It investigates economic instruments as cognitive tools, showing how they generated knowledge through practice and circulation. I study the use of economic tools in a series of case studies of cities, towns, and military contexts in the Roman Empire during the first through seventh centuries CE, addressing in each context how many people were using these tools and in what ways (how the tools manipulated, circulated, and expressed information). From this analysis, I identify specific modes of using tools, modes that depend less on differences like geography than on the general shape, or structure, of communities. One mode thus characterizes cities, another border or frontier areas, and another large-scale organized entities like landed estates. My conclusion draws these disparate modes of using tools together and makes a comparative claim about the use of cognitive economic tools in the Roman Empire versus their development in other contexts. The introduction introduces the scholarly context of the argument the study, setting it in relation to debates on the Roman economy and to studies of cognitive history more broadly. This overview highlights the ways in which the current project is not only a study of economics but of how methods of determining, representing, and manipulating economic value intersect with broader cognitive patterns and cultural imaginaries. The introduction also introduces the evidence and methods of the case studies, including writing in the forms of papyri, graffiti, and tablets; coins; and measuring instruments, and how the study of the distribution and use of these various media will be approached. Finally, the introduction gives an overview of the four chapters and case studies. Chapter 1 contains the first case study, Pompeii, a Roman town of the first century CE destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79. To a greater degree than any other case, Pompeii offers an opportunity to juxtapose the use of different tools within the same community. All three kinds of economic tools are present within the town and are fairly accessible through published information: writing on wax tablets and as graffiti on the walls, the contexts of coins in a number of neighborhoods well published, and the contexts of many measuring tools. In addition, the presence of a number of victims of the eruption throughout the site offers a dimension visible nowhere else: the coins carried by inhabitants of the town at the time of the eruption. This chapter examines these economic tools in turn, beginning with writing on tablets and graffiti, moving to the spatial distribution of coins, then to the coins carried by inhabitants of the town at the time of the eruption, and finally to the distribution of measuring instruments. Pompeii reveals a mode of using economic tools that downplays extensive manipulation of information through writing, stressing instead the consolidation of agreements in the present and the shared notions of value created by coinage. This urban context relies extensively on coins as calculating tools and the creators of a shared value scale, with singular transactions and shared notions of iconic prices taking precedence over methods of determining value that would rely on abstract units, precise measures, or tracking through time. The second chapter concerns the town of Oxyrhynchus in Roman Egypt. The evidence here consists almost solely of papyri gathered since the early twentieth century, originating in trash dumps on the edges of the town and with no more specific context. This chapter thus represents an in-depth exploration of writing as an economic tool, especially the capabilities of writing for organizing and manipulating information through accounting. The chapter first examines which groups of people used accounts. It then investigates the ways in which these accounts by different people organized information, defined the units of money or measure they referenced, and manipulated these units through operations like conversions, addition, and subtraction. The chapter reveals contexts, most notably of taxation and agricultural estates, considerably more concerned with definition and use of measures than the forms of writing visible at Pompeii, and considerably less reliant upon (though often using) coins. However, a localized urban context quite similar to the community at Pompeii also emerges. By this point in the dissertation, two structures for the circulation of value have thus emerged, built around different tools: one largely urban and relying on coins and simple, singular kinds of writing; another largely characteristic of vast productive enterprises (the estate) and establishing and manipulating relations of value through complex writing. The third chapter concerns the communities of Roman forts, and shifts again in location and in evidence type. The chapter is largely concerned with the fort of Vindolanda in Roman Britain, which offers the widest range of material evidence both in terms of types of tools present (both writing and coins) and the area of a single fort excavated, which is far vaster than any other example in this chapter. Still, excavation areas remain more limited than at, say, Pompeii, and are the result of occupation levels rather than large-scale abandonment. For this reason the chapter compares coin use at Vindolanda (no other forts offer the same kind of documentary evidence) to a number of other forts in order to better understand visible trends. As a whole, the fort emerges as a border context, in which the patterns of economic interaction characteristic of Roman communities are in the process of becoming established. The military context acts therefore not as an alternative to either of the structures described above, but as a hybrid taking tenuous shape on the edges of the empire. A pattern emerges in which early forts more closely resemble estates or taxation in their use of economic tools, stressing writing, although their manipulation of information remains less complex. I argue that this similarity in the manipulation of tools results largely from the fort's productive role, which more than any bureaucratic connection makes writing important in very early, transitory forts. Over time, however, all forts incorporate civilian settlements and develop patterns of using economic tools resembling those of towns, stressing coin use and an apparent de-emphasis of writing. In addition to the growth in civilian communities, this change reflects the lack of a productive role in later forts. The fourth chapter concerns another urban context and a later timeframe, the early seventh century CE. The city is Late Antique Sardis, and the chapter deals primarily with material from a row of shops destroyed by fire and earthquake and extensively excavated. The chapter analyzes the coins and measures from the shops and residences along the street. In its destruction by fire, Sardis offers a perspective similar to Pompeii in that coins and measures were preserved in a large area consisting of varying kinds of contexts (residential, commercial, and elite houses). Though similarities with Pompeii are evident (ubiquity of coins and the intermixture of varied types in all contexts), showing the persistence of a particularly urban way of transacting and using coins, especially at the level of manipulation, differences also emerge. At Sardis, coinage is entirely bronze, types of coins are more closely tied to varied contexts (old coins in particular are more sharply limited to certain contexts), and their intermixture is less complete, while the terms on which they relate to one another have also changed. All this suggests a weakening of the power of coinage as a numerical tool over time, linked to the vicissitudes of the monetary system of the Late Antique Empire. The conclusion begins by examining the tools--writing, coins, and measuring instruments--separately, summarizing the different forms of knowledge and social replication they represent. It then argues that these tools formed part of two main structures for circulating value in the Roman Empire, one largely centered in urban communities, using coins and simple, widely-shared conceptions of number, and the other most visible in estate accounting, and privileging writing and the more complex manipulation of information. Finally, the conclusion also makes a broader comparative and historical point, arguing that across contexts in the Roman Empire, economic knowledge was strongly tied to material tools, with conceptions of number staying very close to concrete coins and physical measures, and broader organizational frames or strategies following spatial realities and cyclical notions of time. I argue that this type of knowledge and symbolism differed from that produced by cognitive tools in other periods, most notably those used in the Near East before the invention of coinage, and those developed since the Renaissance. The latter in particular privilege relations between transactions rather than particular concrete realities, thus creating a concept of shared value inherently centered on the future. This new concept of value is largely what defines capitalism, and it too is a political project, though expressed in new kinds of writing rather than through tools of circulation in the present like the Roman coin.