Speaker
Description
Witold Kula, considered one of the founders of the Polish school of social and economic history linked to the French school of Annales, was at the origin of the current called “historical metrology”. Since its founding work in the 1970s, which focused on the logic of traditional measurement systems, studies of weights and measures systems now take into account both the technical aspects and the social context of measuring and weighing. These studies are no longer strictly dependent on economic history. The idea was often to go beyond the quantitative approach and to develop methods by combining archaeological and epigraphic data in order to understand the far-reaching implications of metrology and economy in ancient societies. This paper will focus on these methods, which illustrate new trends in the history of weights and measures.
