The Archaeology of Money

This volume contains papers presented at a workshop on The Archaeology of Money held in 2013 at the University of Tübingen, as part of the University of Leicester’s Leverhulme Trust funded Tracing Networks programme. The contributors offer insights into the study of money from both archaeological and anthropological perspectives, ranging from notions of value and varying material manifestations of monetary objects, to the multiplicity of functions these can perform as economic, social and ritual media in different cultural contexts. The broad geographical and chronological spread of the papers, from prehistory to the present day, provides a comparative approach to the archaeology of money, exploring the trajectories by which money and coin use developed, emphasising distinctive cultural features and regional variations, and challenging perceived views of the economic functions of money.