Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to be the original 'affluent society'.

Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition (David Graeber) Introduction 1. The Original Affluent Society 2. The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction 3. The Domestic Mode or Production: Intensification of Production 4. The Spirit of the Gift 5. On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange 6. Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade

Marshall Sahlins is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.