Compared with the farmers on the Danube Plain, the Mitterberg copper miners left behind few ornaments or luxuries. But they were better off than they could be trying to live self-sufficiently in the mountains raising their own food. They were not supplying a need; they were making a living, responding to economic incentives as clearly as any modern person. Homo economicus was not an eighteenth-century Scottish invention. Their copper, turned into ingots and sickles, standardised for weight, then broken up and circulated far and wide, would soon become a primitive form of money widely used
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