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A hoard of Bronze Age metal fragments from Weißig, Germany
J. Lipták / State Office for Archeology Saxony
Bronze Age Europeans earned and spent money much more than we do today, indicating that the origins of the “market economy” are much older than expected.
This is the controversial conclusion of new research that challenges the view that elites were the dominant force in the Bronze Age economy, and suggests that human economic behavior has not changed much in the last 3,500 years – and maybe even longer.
“We often tend to romanticize European prehistory, but the Bronze Age was not a fantasy realm where townspeople and peasants were just the backdrop for a great lord providing for his needs,” he says. Nicola Ialongo at Aarhus University in Denmark. “It was a very familiar world where people had families, friends, a social network, markets and a job, and finally I had to figure out how to meet them.”
Bronze Age Europeans, a period spanning from 3300 to 800 BC, were not as meticulously conservative as the people of some other ancient societies, such as Mesopotamia. But Ialong is Giancarlo Lago at the University of Bologna in Italy, suggest that important revelations about their daily lives, and the roots of our own modern economic behavior, can be found in the troves of metal fragments, known as hoards , which they left.
Lago and Ialongo analyzed more than 20,000 metal objects from hoards buried in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany during the Bronze Age. Pieces appear in many forms, but around 1500 BC, they begin to be standardized by weight, a change that many experts believe distinguish them as a form of pre-coinage money.
“The discovery of a widespread system of measurement and weight allows us to model things that have been known for centuries in a way that has never been modeled before,” says Ialongo. “This opens up new results to old questions, but also new questions that no one was asking before.”
To this end, the team found that the weight values of the huge sample follow the same statistical distribution as the daily expenses of a modern Western family: the small daily expenses, represented by lighter fragments, make up most of the consumer models, while larger. expenses, represented by heavier fragments, were comparatively rare. This model is analogous to what you might find in an average modern wallet, with many smaller bills and very few high-value ones.
Lago and Ialongo interpret the findings as evidence that Bronze Age economic systems were regulated by market forces of supply and demand, in which everyone participated proportionally to how much they earned. This hypothesis is in contrast to an influential view presented in the 1940s by the anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who extended modern economies based on monetary profit as a new phenomenon and distinct from ancient economies centered around barter, exchange of gifts and social standing.
Richard Blanton at Purdue University in Indiana finds the study to be credible. “The argument, I think, will raise the discussion between archaeologists and economic anthropologists, who have been working under false assumptions about the antiquity of the market economy for decades,” he says.
“I think this paper will beneficially add fuel to that kind of criticism,” says Blanton. “For me, the paper sheds new light on the function of bronze hoards and their potential for using bronze pieces as a unit of exchange.”
However, Erica Schoenberger at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland is skeptical of the team’s conclusions. “It is risky to assume that ordinary people in pre-modern times used money in ordinary economic ways,” says Schoenberger. “Medieval English peasants, for example, began to sell their produce for money only when their lords began to demand money in lieu of rents in kind and taxes. The peasants handed over most—if not all—of that money directly to the lord. They sold to get money, but they did not use to buy the things they needed. We are still very far from modern economic behavior (in the Middle Ages).
Lago and Ialongo hope their research will inspire specialists in other fields to develop similar work on artifacts from different regions and cultures. They suggest that the market economy is born naturally in time and in cultures, and that such systems are not new or special inventions of Western societies that emerged over the last centuries.
“Technically, we are not proving that the Bronze Age economy was a market economy,” says Ialongo. “We simply do not find evidence that it was not. And we simply notice the paradox: why is everyone convinced that the market economy does not exist, if everything we see can be explained by a market economy model? other words, why should we imagine a more complex explanation, if the simpler one works well?
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