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Money as Material Cognition
| This paper focuses on the intersection of money and institutions from the perspective of material practice, stressing how the uses and limits of economic tools like coins and writing in the Roman world grew out of the particular organizational frameworks in which they were required to work. In scholarship, discussions of “money” often attempt to move beyond physical forms, while money (in whatever form), writing, and measures are often lumped together as historic developments and assumed to work in similar ways. However, specific technical uses of writing (in accounting, for example) and coins had long traditions of practice that were not necessarily identical or unified across contexts. In the Roman period, the specific form of money-as-coins, and the specific types of writing employed in accounting and other documents, took different forms within different communities. In particular, coins specifically dominated the cognitive framework of localized urban exchange in to the exclusion of most writing. The latter remained much more prevalent in contexts of large estates and taxation. These organizational entities could create larger networks within which they controlled distribution of materials and value substitutions of one item for another, the latter techniques evolving from different traditions and along different historical channels than the use of coins.
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