How did some communities in the premodern world build prosperous lives without modern markets?
Across the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous communities developed economic systems that were sophisticated and deeply rooted to the place. In this lecture, Anna Prentiss will provide a comparative look at how households and larger institutions organized and distributed work, land, food and other resources. How did people balance everyday subsistence with an obsession with craft, and what was the social power of feasting and ritual gifting? Drawing on both archaeology and ethnography, Professor Prentiss will show how ecology and population pressures shaped cooperation and hierarchy over long spans of time in this region.
Anna Marie Prentiss is an American archaeologist and Regents Professor of Anthropology at the University of Montana.