Some readers of Archaeological dialogues may be surprised to discover that the discussion article featured in this issue neither is written by an archaeologist nor makes overt reference to archaeology. Curious as that may seem, we see this as a productive move in the journal's continuing mission to find innovative, and sometimes provocative, ways to stimulate conversations that transgress disciplinary boundaries. In soliciting this piece, we felt that, as two of the most important contributors to the theoretical development of the historical anthropology of colonialism and as scholars who have been at the forefront of cultural anthropology's new re-engagement with the study of material culture, the work of Jean and John Comaroff offers an exceptional opportunity for a creatively heuristic conjuncture between archaeology and cultural anthropology, and that it deserves to be widely read and discussed by archaeologists.

This essay explores the role of commensuration – the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodification, their nature as social processes has not been adequately specified, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. We pursue these processes in relation to one African theatre, examining the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both conflict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility and the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.

Jean and John Comaroff's paper provides an elegant narrative describing the processes at work behind the adoption of coinage amongst the Tswana of southern Africa under the influence of European missionaries and colonists. My own particular interests are set back two thousand years earlier with the adoption of coin in France and Britain. At this time Rome was the up-and-coming imperial power engaged in trade, and then conquest, stretching its area of influence and dominions from the Mediterranean littoral into temperate Europe. As such I envy the Comaroff's ability to use a rich array of source material that is unavailable to me with my much poorer archaeological remains and fragmentary literary sources. None the less, many of the themes have echoes of processes that must have taken place many years before in this other time and place.

This thought-provoking essay strives to theorize the concept of ‘regimes of value’ and, more specifically, the role of material objects in the convertibility of different orders of value in the making of modern economies and societies. Put forth by Arjun Appadurai in his edited volume The social life of things (1986), the notion of regime of value originally referred to the use of categories of material objects in the construction of value within a specific cultural context. Appadurai was more concerned with the way value is invested in objects than in theories of exchange and currency, consequently the notion remained relatively untheorized. Jean and John Comaroff break new theoretical ground in at least two ways. First, they take into consideration and juxtapose different regimes of value – primarily cattle for the southern Tswana peoples and currency for the European colonizers – to see how they are constructed and become the focus of complex mediations between these groups in the colonial context of South Africa. Cattle, like currency (in the form of coins or paper money), come to objectify value because they have the power to make or break social relations, to build new social hierarchies or overturn old ones, to do or undo moral economies. They show that different regimes of value can coexist in the same social space and be played out against one another. Second, Jean and John Comaroff interrogate the role of conversion, or ‘commensuration’, as they say, of regimes of value, that is, their power to make objects from different cultural contexts universally objectifiable, comparable and negotiable. Instead of making difference, as is usually thought, it is the capacity to negate difference and make all things equal that expresses the effectiveness of a regime of value. It is also these processes of commensuration and conversion that give material objects their magical qualities, through which they become fetishized and ‘seem to have a power all of their own’ (p. 131). More than the written word or oral discourse, it is material objects that become the preferred tools and means of colonial domination. The authors contribute then to a better understanding of the workings of political economies as well as to the materialities of colonialism.

A new sub-field in the archaeology of race has been emerging among historical archaeologists based in the US and South Africa. A review of this literature, put into play with some thoughts from Ralph Ellison and Franz Fanon, provides several ‘object lessons’ about the state of archaeological theory and practice, and the difficulties inherent in framing a material study of race. The literature exemplifies how archaeology is fast becoming an anachronistic critique of modernity that may hinder our ability to see difference in the past. At the same time, a brave new project of comparison might position us to contribute a unique perspective on the spiral of history.

The neolithic communities of central Anatolia are generally reconstructed as being constituted by relatively autonomous and homologous households occupying discrete residences and performing most domestic activities in the house. In this reconstruction households are seen as the uniform and unproblematic basic component of society. This paper aims to problematize this modular conception of central Anatolian Neolithic societies, and wants to draw attention to the multiple forms in which households occurred and the manner in which they were embedded in larger social associations. It is argued that different levels of social association can only be understood in relation to each other. Further, the manner in which social configurations in central Anatolia changed over time is explored. This will be done by presenting evidence from two central Anatolian Neolithic sites: Aşıklı Höyük and Çatalhöyük. In particular, we argue that households became autonomous and clearly bounded entities only towards the end of the central Anatolian Neolithic, and that too little consideration has been given to the neighbourhood and the local community encompassing individual households.