Burying the Hatchet

Colin Harris and Adam Kaiser

Revue d'économie politique, 2020, vol. 130, issue 6, 1025-1044

Abstract: Why do people bury items with their dead? We provide a theory of grave goods as a mechanism to mitigate internal conflict. Where inheritance laws are ambiguous and low-cost mechanisms for dispute resolution do not exist, deliberately destroying wealth can prevent conflict over the redistribution of assets following a death. Rather than engage in costly infighting over inheritance, the parties agree to mutual destruction through a shared cultural practice of grave goods. We test our theory using evidence from saga era Vikings. JEL codes: N4, K0, D3, H1

Keywords: Grave Goods; Vikings; Medieval Iceland; Conflict; Inheritance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 H1 K0 N4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REDP_306_0183 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2020-6-page-1025.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cai:repdal:redp_306_0183

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie politique from Dalloz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().