De Poids et de Mesure Les instruments de pesée en Europe occidentale durant les âges des Métaux (XIVe-IIIe s. a.C.)

Overview & Synopsis

The use of weighing instruments and the handling of concepts of counting and measuring by Late Prehistory societies have been the subject of few systematic studies in archaeology. This book, resulting from a doctoral thesis, offers a diachronic analysis of weights and balance elements discovered in Western Europe and dated between the 14th and 3rd centuries BC. One of the aims of this work is to reexamine the place occupied by the practice of weighing in protohistoric societies on a large scale, in the diachrony, by means of a uniform protocol and by integrating the contextual data brought by archaeology. Contrary to the general idea, the results of this study paint a picture of practices that are most often poorly embedded within the societies studied and that rarely reach a large-scale metrological homogenisation that would allow for a fluidity of quantitative information during exchanges (weight units used, counting systems employed, permitted measurement intervals, frequency of multiples and fractions of systems).The archaeological remains of the practice of weighing thus lead us to believe that it remained infrequent in Late Prehistory Western Europe and that its evolution between the Late Bronze Age and the 3rd century B.C. is marked by a complex and non-linear relationship of innovations, persistence, transformations of local origin or linked to foreign influences, but also probably of regressions and abandons.