Lyle Browning’s question about prices for staples and farm machinery
raises an important question that historical archaeologists, for the most
part, have ignored.  Clearly, we are not in a position to build our own
price series.  Paul Mullins responded with some important sources on this
topic.  Understanding the history of prices is important for the study of
the past.  There is an excellent good book on the subject by David Hackett
Fischer titled *The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of
History*published by Oxford University Press in 1996.
His book reads very well and is a wonderful introduction to the
subject.  Fischer’s
book has 15 appendices that are also very readable.  Appendix “O” has an
interesting comment on the “*International Committee on Prices*” that
gathered price histories for many cities in several countries.  This work
began as part of an attempt to build a body of data for understanding the
impact of depressions and other economic phenomena.



According to Fischer the type of research and data gathering done by the
International Committee on Prices in the 1930s and 1940s went out of fashion
following an article by Jalling Koopmans’ titled “Measurement without
Theory” in 1947.  This seems to have been the beginning of a movement that
led to changes in sociology, anthropology, economics and other fields that
devalued the simple gathering of data such building a price series.  The
“New Archaeology” of the 1960s with its hypothesis testing was part of that
wave of justifying research by having a question to be answered and against
the gathering of data without a question in mind.  Fischer’s book is a good
defense of the building of price series, as he made excellent hay with price
series to build his overview of changes through time.  I highly recommend *The
Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History* for a broader
insight into history.



            Arthur Harrison Cole compiled information from the
“International Committee on Prices” in Wholesale Commodity Prices in the
United States 1700-1861.  Harvard University Press published his study in
1938, which was reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation in 1969.  Prices
from some of the cities included those from New York, Philadelphia, New
Orleans, and Cincinnati.  Cole’s study generated “market baskets” of
consumable goods and indexed them to periods of economic stability so one
could see the impact of wars and economic panics on prices.



Philadelphia prices have been studied extensively by Anne Bezanson and her
colleagues as can be seen by the following:



Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey.

1935            *Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania*, University of
Pennsylvania Press.

1936    *Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia 1784-1861*, University of
Pennsylvania Press.



Anne Bezanson

1954            *Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia 1852-1896*, *Colonial
Pennsylvania*, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thomas Senior Berry published *Western Prices before 1861*, published in
1943 by Harvard University Press.  Other studies can be found in the
bibliographies of Fischer and Cole.



T. M. Adams produced a study titled “Prices paid by Vermont Farmers for
goods and services and received by them for farm products, 1790-1940; Wages
of Vermont Farm Labor, 1780-1940,” published by the Vermont Agricultural
Experiment Station in February of 1944, Bulletin 107.  This study collected
price data from account books, invoices and other data and is a good insight
into the problems of building a price series.



Here are a couple of other articles that might be of interest.

Ethel D. Hoover

1960    “Retail Prices after 1850” pages 141-190 in *Trends in American
Economy in the Nineteenth Century: Studies in Income and Wealth*.  Volume 24
by the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth.  A report of the
National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, published by Princeton
University Press



Gisli Gunnarsson

1976    “A Study in the Historiography of Prices”  pages 124-141 *Economy
and History* Vol. XIX no. 2, 1976.



You can gain some insights into the role of country stores in the
distribution system by reading Thomas D. Clark’s *Pills, Petticoats, &
Plows: The Southern Country Store*, reprinted by the University of Oklahoma
Press 1974.  Clark had a large collection of country store account books.  It
is a fun read, but not much in the way of prices.  For the period of the
mail order houses I would recommend Boris Emmet and John F. Jeuck’s *Catalogues
and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company*, published by the
University of Chicago Press in 1950.  It has great information on how Sears
and Roebuck would place large orders for things like cream separators,
bicycles, and other manufacture products to gain large price discounts and
then have large sales of these items at much lower prices.  These discounted
sales created what might be considered “horizon” events for the widespread
adoption of things like cream separators and bicycles.  *Catalogues and
Counters* is also a good read.



Historical archaeologists need to move beyond being able to identify and
date objects to seeing the larger picture, and economics can provide an
important too in that process.



Peace,

George L. Miller