Marginal Lives and Fractured Families. The Hidden Archaeology of Household Debt and Instability in Medieval Iceland

Summary

Archaeologists generally assume that the absence of market exchange implies an absence of financial debt as a mechanism of exchange and social control found in more "advanced" economies. This implicit logic is reproduced in contexts where identifying market exchange largely relies on tracking the circulation of specialized and imported goods, as is the case in medieval Iceland: a society largely made up of subsistence tenant farmers where archaeological indicators of market exchange virtually disappear after the Viking Age settlement of the island. But David Graeber urges us to look deeper for sophisticated systems of value and material exchange in societies that have been traditionally considered to have primitive economies. His work also calls attention to the ways that debt, as a social and economic phenomenon, structures relationships and the juridical status of individuals. Reevaluating medieval Iceland with this lens, we see the disappearance of imported goods following the Viking Age not as evidence of a primitive subsistence economy but rather the development of an entrenched system of financial debt that had profound implications for the juridical and personal status of individuals as a failure to pay debts frequently resulted in the fracture of the family and household.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20463