Tracing back the line of the history of money is a long, fastidious but fascinating task. But when it comes to digging up the tenuous traces of ancient money through prehistory, it turns into a real treasure hunt with nothing but a faded map.
Before the very existence of coins, exchanges of goods were common, hunter-gatherers trading any type of goods against another, such as raw materials, skins, cereals, beads, tools, and more. Without written testimonials, it remains hard to know how these exchanges took place, and how the value of items were estimated. The weight of raw materials was probably taken into account, but also the rarity of the material, its quality and the need of such items. Raw materials started to travel through Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic (35 000 – 10 000 BP), but the first concrete evidence for trade and barter appeared only from the Neolithic period (8 000 – 2 200 years BC) onwards.
Indeed, the birth of agriculture during the Neolithic period comforted bartering practices, people using mainly live stocks, grain and pottery as an exchange money. In Europe, the Neolithic period witnessed the appearance of tools that were mainly designed for exchanges, such as the Grand Pressigny flint blades in France, some of them found up to 800 km away from their birth location. The same phenomenon was observed through the thousands polished-axes that were made in Plussulien (France) and traveled hundreds of kilometers until some of them reached England (Demoule 2007).
In China, the use of the cowrie shell as a currency is attested during the Neolithic area. Due to its scarcity, imitations of the shell have been found made from jade, stone, bone, earthenware, gold, tin, and bronze in many archaeological sites. This type of shell was found in Oceania, Africa and in the Middle and Far East, with varying value depending on the distance traveled to collect it. As a matter of fact, this very type of shell is still used as a currency in Ethiopia and remote regions of Africa nowadays (Davies, 1994).
Pottery artifacts were also used as pre-money in latter populations, such as the engraved clay-balls (or terracotta-balls) with standardized weight that were found in Enkomi (Cyprus) and in other Greek archaeological sites that date back to the Mycenian period (1 600 – 1 150 BC) (Persson 1946).
Later on, the Bronze Age (2 200 – 800 BC) suggest the same type of events, with suspicious buried « treasures » that were found in different places: they are usually dozens of bronze tools (swords, knives, axes) buried in chests, voluntarily broken or torn, or cut into equal pieces of uniform weight that could be used for exchanges. They could have be exchange-money, or a strong and generalized symbol of wealth, or simply meant to be re-melted. Examples of such things were found for instance in France at Biessard, Villethierry, Yonne and Reuilly-Chéry.(Briard 2001). During this time period metal could also be traded in the shape of powders, nuggets or rings, that are easily divisible and weighted.
The first concrete examples of pre-money are the Columbella shells of the Mediterranean during European Bronze age. Some Chalcolithic exports included copper spear heads from Palmela and crockery beads from Egypt. There was also « ring money » consisting of copper rings covered in silver and gold used during the Late Bronze Age, found in the British Isles and exported in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Armorican lead socketed axes are the first complete system of paleo-money. In England another form of pre-money were the iron currency bars of the Early Iron Age.(Briard 2001)
During the Iron Age (800 – 50 BC), armorican bronze axes were found by thousands at the site of Maure-de-Bretagne (France) and were interpreted as pre-money because of their weights - that varied but remained standardized – but also because of their composition, which was not adequate for any use as a tool (Briard 2001). Iron was then kept mainly in the form of ingots or paleo-money, as described by Julius Caesar in theWar of Gauls: sword- shaped currency bars were found in the south of the British Isles that evolved into slit-shaped bars. Soon, the ingots were stamped to ensure the quality and weight of their ware. They stopped being used during the first half of the 1stcentury BC, as soon as coins appeared. (Briard 2001).
The real coins that gave rise to the money system we know of today appeared when the quality of the materials was guaranteed by the state, with a fixed value for each coin decided by a public entity, with an official stamp applied to it.
The origin of the word « money » came just a time later, from the roman goddess Juno Moneta in whose temple the first coin workshop was created, while the oldest coin known today dates back to the 7thcentury BC town of Ephesus (Turkey), where coins made of a gold and silver alloy called electrum where discovered.
As for the rest of the story, I'll leave it to my dear historians and numismatists, that will probably know more about it than a young archaeo-anthropologist! If needed, I can provide some images related to the archaeological items that were found.
Sources
Persson ,Axel Waldemar (1946) Contribution à la question de l'origine de la monnaie. In: Bulletin de correspondance hellénique. Volume 70, pp. 444-454.
Briard, Jacques (2001) Les objets paléomonétaires de l'Europe atlantique protohistorique. In: Revue numismatique, 6e série – Tome 157, pp. 37-50.
Davies, Glyn. (1994) A History of Money, from Ancient Times to the Present Day. University of Wales.
Demoule, Jean-Paul, dir. (2007) La révolution néolithique en France, éditions La Découverte, Paris, pp. 180.
