PEOPLE living in what is now California may have been the first Americans to invent money, according to a new analysis of shell beads produced 2000 years ago by the Chumash, a Native American community.
There is general agreement that money existed in the Americas before Europeans arrived. The Chumash’s beads, fashioned from the shells of purple dwarf olive sea snails (Olivella biplicata), are seen as a classic example of this.
“Almost all the scholars who focus on the Chumash have agreed that the shell beads were money,” says Lynn Gamble at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But while previous studies have dated this use to about 800 years ago, she now suspects that Chumash money has a much deeper history.
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Gamble says there are four features that archaeologists should look for to identify ancient money. Unlike other signifiers of wealth, such as jewellery, currency shouldn’t necessarily be decorative or eye-catching, but it should be labour-intensive to produce. It should also be highly standardised in terms of its physical dimensions. Finally, currency should be widely distributed among the population.
“2000
The age of shell beads that may be the first money in the Americas”
Gamble confirmed that a type of Chumash shell bead shaped like a cup that was in use about 800 years ago possessed all of these features, aligning with previous studies. However, she realised that a form of saucer-shaped bead produced about 2000 years ago also had the same characteristics (Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, ).
For instance, these earlier beads were more standardised than the 800-year-old cup beads, and have been discovered in their hundreds of thousands across California, even though analysis of the beads suggests that most were created in what is now a southern corner of the modern state.
Eleanor Fishburn, a member of the Chumash community and an anthropologist, appreciates the work of researchers like Gamble – although she says the Chumash’s relationship with the scientific community isn’t always easy. “A lot of pain and a lot of hurt gets brought up.” But she thinks the new work is fascinating. “Reading this paper, I really put myself in that time and place,” she says.
The earliest known money in Asia more than 4000 years ago, but Gamble’s analysis would make the Chumash beads the earliest known money in the Americas, before civilisations like the Mayans.
In 2018, Joanne Baron at the Bard Early College Network in New Jersey suggested that the Maya people began using and cacao beans as currency 1400 years ago. “You had these two powerful kingdoms – Calakmul and Tikal – and they were increasingly competing for influence over their neighbours,” says Baron. They did so by attracting more households to buy and sell in their marketplaces. As households chose to participate, cacao and textiles – items that hadn’t previously been bought and sold – became commodities. Rulers eventually started requiring them in tribute payments as well, solidifying them as a currency.
Significantly, Gamble’s study suggests money might emerge in the absence of powerful kingdoms, as the Chumash operated as a at the time.
But other researchers are unconvinced that the evidence from the shell beads alone can tell us that the Chumash had money 2000 years ago. Robert Rosenswig at the University at Albany in New York takes a contrasting view that defines money as an accounting system that powerful authorities use to keep track of tribute payments or taxes from the population and that the existence of currency-like objects isn’t, on its own, evidence of money.
Rosenswig thinks Gamble’s research convincingly shows that Chumash money dates back 800 years because we have a sense of how Chumash society functioned then. But he says the idea that the Chumash had money 2000 years ago isn’t persuasive because we don’t know how the shell beads were used then. “If you could demonstrate there were powerful chiefs extracting tribute that far back, and show how the beads function in that system, for me, that would be more convincing.”
Baron argues that this way of defining money is too restrictive. “The history of money has been studied primarily in Eurasia, so it predisposes us to look for money only in certain situations, in state-like societies,” she says. “If we broaden the definition of money to include non-state societies, then I certainly think there’s room for archaeologists to look for evidence of it elsewhere.”
