Bronze Age Europeans earned and spent money in much the same way as we do today, indicating that the origins of the “market economy” are far more ancient than expected.
“We often tend to romanticise European prehistory, but the Bronze Age was not a fantasy realm where townsfolk and peasants were merely the background for some great lord providing for their needs,” saysat Aarhus University in Denmark. “It was a very familiar world where people had families, friends, a social network, marketplaces and a job, and ultimately had to figure out how to make ends meet.”
Lago and Ialongo analysed more than 20,000 metal objects from hoards buried in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany during the Bronze Age. The pieces appear in many forms, but around 1500 BC, they start to become standardised by weight, a shift that“The discovery of a widespread measurement and weight system makes it possible to model things that have been known about for centuries in a way that they have never been modelled before,” says Ialongo.
Lago and Ialongo interpret the findings as evidence that Bronze Age economic systems were regulated by supply and demand market forces, in which everyone participates proportionally to how much they earn. This hypothesis stands in contrast to an influential view put forth in the 1940s by the anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who cast modern economies based on monetary profit as a new and distinct phenomenon from ancient economies centred around barter, gift exchange and social standing.