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Book: Nuragic Sanctuaries

Chapter: Ritual and Embedded Means of Economic Control

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.22856

Blurb:

The question of “wealth control”, in relation to the steady flow of metal offerings in sanctuaries, is developed in this chapter. The question is empirically tackled by attempting an approximate evaluation of the quantity of metal that was possibly deposed in cultic contexts, in a given time unit. The resulting framework is discussed against large-scale, demand-based economic models that were often proposed for Bronze Age Europe by different authors. The question of local-scale, patron-client economic models is then put into perspective.

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