An ancient form of European currency: rings, ribs and blades in bronze



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The modern world operates on a constant flow of money which has its roots in simpler proto-currencies launched regionally by ancient peoples.

Two archaeologists believe they have identified a very ancient example of commodity money in Europe, used around 3,500 years ago in the Bronze Age, with denominations that took the form of bronze rings, ribs and ax blades . People in this era frequently buried collections of these ubiquitous objects, leaving a wealth of “treasures” scattered across the European continent.

In a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, Maikel Kuijpers, assistant professor of European prehistory at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and Catalin N. Popa, who was a postdoctoral researcher there, compared the weights of more than 5,000 rings of Bronze Age, Ribs, and Blades, from over 100 reserves containing at least five items.

The results revealed that 70% of the rings were so close in mass – on average about 7 ounces – that they would have been indistinguishable if they were weighed by hand. Although the ribs and ax blades are not as uniform, the study concludes that the artefacts are similar enough to collectively demonstrate “the earliest development of commodity money in prehistoric central Europe.”

“It’s a very clear standardization,” said Dr Kuijpers.

While other researchers questioned some of their findings, they agreed that the study added to our knowledge about the economic activities of ancient peoples.

As the forging of bronze spread across Europe, these ax rings, ribs and blades were cast for functional purposes – such as jewelry and tools – that might have been unrelated to silver. Some of the items in the dataset likely retained strictly utilitarian or ornamental roles because their weights were well above the calculated average.

But the comparable weights of many of the artifacts leave “no doubt that at least the rings and ribs meet the definition of commodity money,” the authors wrote. The bronze artefacts reflect tool-based forms of currency, known as utensil money, found elsewhere, such as knife and spade silver found in China and Aztec hoe and shovel silver. the ax found in Mesoamerica.

“We have examples in other parts of the world where you seem to have this kind of similar development” where “a handy tool turns into that utensil money and then into that basic money,” Dr Kuijpers said. .

A central innovation of bronze is the possibility of making duplicates by pouring the metal into molds. The study assumes that these nearly identical copies gave rise, over time, to an abstract concept of weight, which laid the mental foundation for the invention of weighing tools and technologies that emerged in Europe over centuries. late in the Bronze and Iron Age.

Nicola Ialongo, a prehistoric archaeologist at Georg August University in Göttingen, Germany, said the study offered “an important contribution to understanding how early funds worked,” but there was a less complicated explanation for how from which these standardized objects appeared.

“As the authors acknowledge, the regularity of their samples could simply be explained by imagining that the objects in their data sets were molded with a limited number of molds, or that the molds themselves had a standardized shape,” said Dr Ialongo.

Also, he added, ancient people could have counted this currency as we count coins today, rather than focusing on weight.

“Simply put, you don’t need a weight system to be able to use metals – or any other commodity – as currency,” he said, adding that many other less durable things may have been. used as currency before these bronze articles.

The authors retort that “weight mattered” because “there are indications that for certain types of objects a deliberate effort was made to achieve a specific weight range”.

Barry Molloy, associate professor of archeology at University College Dublin who was not involved in the study, noted that “there has long been a suspicion that systems of weights and measures were in use in Europe. of the Bronze Age ”.

“The research was metric-precise, such as can be found in Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean,” said Dr Molloy. “Although this article does not demonstrate that there was such a coherent system, it does provide important information on how ancient peoples in Europe themselves were able to approach these problems in a pragmatic way before formal weight systems came into being. are developed in the Iron Age.

Although Dr Ialongo disagreed with some of the researchers’ methods, he also hailed the study as “a remarkable attempt to break one of the oldest and most enduring taboos in prehistoric archeology, namely that “primitive” societies do not have a real commercial economy. “

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