Water is not kind to iron, as demonstrated by the ‘rusty treasure’ uncovered at Deinham in Upper Austria, now revealed as the largest assemblage of bipyramidal iron bars yet found in Europe. While similar bars are generally attributed to the Early Iron Age (eighth–fifth centuries BC), the authors here argue that the Deinham bars are a new variant, radiocarbon dated to the Late Iron Age (fourth–first centuries BC). Discovered in a silted-up branch of the Danube River, the bars were likely lost in a shipwreck, permitting speculation as to the purpose and exchange value of this weighty cargo.

Studies of pottery production and exchange under the Mexica (Aztec) empire have emphasized the role of elites, the constraints created by the market system, or the effects of persistent regionalism in shaping economic patterns. We build on those studies by emphasizing the role of commoners and how their decisions and strategies shaped pottery production and exchange after the formation of the Mexica empire. We present a neutron activation analysis of 111 pottery samples from Xaltocan, including a variety of decorated and undecorated serving vessels and utilitarian pottery from contexts that date to the Mexica empire. The chemical composition of the pottery indicates production of different types at Xaltocan, Cuauhtitlan, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Otumba, Chalco, and the southern basin of Mexico. While some types were produced at a variety of locales, a few of the types sampled were produced only or mostly at Xaltocan, including Red Ware, Aztec Polychrome, and Fabric Marked pottery. The findings suggest that commoners were actively copying or producing different types without elite or Mexica control, and that perhaps they preferred to use some locally produced types instead of pottery made elsewhere. The findings show the power of commoners in shaping their economic lives even under imperial control.

While ethnographic observation has revealed nuances of ground stone production techniques and practical uses, there has been little theorizing about the archaeological exchange and movement of these goods or their deeper social meanings. In previous research, we obtained secure geochemical signatures for an ancient Maya ground stone tool assemblage by sourcing granite outcrops in Belize, enabling us to trace the provenience of certain archaeological assemblages. To understand the exchange mechanisms by which ground stone tools moved around the landscape, we explore three non-mutually exclusive models. We outline our expectations of material correlates for the archaeological record based on these exchange hypotheses and evaluate our assemblages against these expectations. This work helps broaden understandings of the organizational importance of ground stone tool production, exchange, and usage within ancient Maya society, critical first steps for investigating the socioeconomic dimensions of these tools.

The proliferation of volunteering for development (V4D) models, approaches and funding sources means V4D is no longer able to be neatly located within the third sector. The enormous diversity of interactions within the Youth V4D (YV4D) field provides an opportunity to examine new and different activities and trajectories to ascertain the extent to which the traditional values of V4D, reciprocity and solidarity continue to form part of YV4D. Using the classical third sector model of Evers and Laville (The third sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004), and drawing on Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001 [1944]) and Mauss (The gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Routledge, London, 1990 [1925]), in particular their concepts of redistribution and reciprocity, we present three case studies of new hybrid YV4D trajectories—university YV4D, state YV4D programmes, and volunteer tourism/voluntourism—to reveal the different logics and features of contemporary YV4D. We argue that understanding these contemporary YV4D trajectories requires a focus on organisational and stakeholder structures of diverse volunteering activities, their relational logics and the forms of reciprocity they involve. We find that in the YV4D case studies we explore the neoliberal market logic of exchange, along with political ideologies and state interests, affects the YV4D model design.

International volunteering has become a complex field in the context of globalization. Within the discourses of international volunteering and development programs as well as in the voices of volunteers, the field can be understood as one of unpaid transnational labor, as social activism and altruism, and as a new “soft power” post-colonial agenda. Many studies contend in this context that international volunteers need better training for intercultural understanding amidst these disparate frameworks, to make meaning out of their service and effectively contribute to communities they serve. This study examines the motivations, experiences, and challenges of US volunteer teachers in China’s Yunnan Province as reported within a survey implemented in 2012. Findings elaborate on the challenge volunteers face reconciling cross-cultural views of education while working in post-colonial global contexts, and suggest that intercultural training is necessary to prepare volunteers for related global work practices in the future.

Commerce is not zero-sum. There are gains from trade. This insight grounded Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This issue heralds the 250th anniversary of its publication. We consider its context, including influences such as David Hume and especially Smith’s own The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Stretching for 1.5km and consisting of approximately 5200 precisely aligned holes, Monte Sierpe in southern Peru is a remarkable construction that likely dates to at least the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400) and saw continued use by the Inca (AD 1400–1532). Yet its function remains uncertain. Here, the authors report on new analyses of drone imagery and sediment samples that reveal numerical patterns in layout, potential parallels with Inca knotted-string records and the presence of crops and wild plants. All this, the authors argue, suggests that Monte Sierpe functioned as a local, Indigenous system of accounting and exchange.

Autonomy theories of contract are influential and have many attractions, not least their compatibility with liberal ideals. However, such theories cannot account for basic features of the common law of contract, in particular: the role of established transaction types, the doctrine of consideration and the phenomenon of contractual obligation. An exchange theory of contract can account for those features of the law. This theory’s liberal credentials can be established by connecting it to an alternative intellectual strand in the liberal tradition, sometimes known as commercial liberalism.

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.