An archaeology for future economies Dr Adam S Green and Dr Nancy Highcock

Event details

Book Launch event

We are faced with the urgent task of designing a fair and sustainable economy in the wake of many pressing political and environmental challenges. While these current crises are in many ways unprecedented, they bear similarities to both acute and long-term changes that have shaped human economies since the beginnings of agriculture. Critical paleoeconomics (CPE) is a call to learn from the economies of the deep past to think differently about inequality, entrepreneurship and growth, with the aim of helping design a better future.

We would like to invite you to an evening celebrating the launch of the open-access book Cities and citadels: an archaeology of inequality and economic growth. Cities and citadels was jointly authored by five archaeologists who work in different parts of the world with interests in different aspects of past human economies. We adopt the view that although archaeology is typically concerned with the deep past, the archaeological record helps us understand how we got to where we are today and must inform us about where to go in the future. Toward this end, we take up the economic theories of Thomas Piketty, Mariana Mazzucato and David Graeber, exploring the relevance of their insights to the study of ancient and prehistoric contexts. We draw on case studies from the Neolithic to the Classical Era, putting forth a new grand narrative of economic change that can provide vital new ideas for building a fairer economy in the 21st Century.