ABSTRACT
In modern society it is normal to distinguish different areas of activity such as the political, the economic and the social. These divisions, however, are the product of a historically specific set of recent and contemporary societies and should not be used automatically as appropriate categories for the discussion of other social groups; the division, for instance, between a public sphere of political activity and a private sphere of social life is predominantly a recent one. It has been common in recent years for archaeologists to talk of the economy being ‘embedded’ in society; to use another metaphor, we should perhaps think of political, economic and social as being three different facets of the same set of activities.
