Destiny Shaw

Final Essay
Anthropology 1030-004-Sp16
Throughout history there have been many contributing factors to how human societies
were built and how they functioned. One of the main contributing factors is the premise of
money, debt, and credit. It has long been believed that as the human culture progressed, so did
the concept of the market economy. The main theory being that first a system of barter evolved
into a system of trade and currency, and finally the rise of the nation states and temple
compounds to regulate and tax markets. Throughout this course we have looked at the evolution
of modern day humans from our earliest know ancestors, australopithecines, to the times of the
ancients and prehistory and the evolution of economy.
It is easy for most to envision the evolution of barter into a large scale, even global,
market economy because it is the system that we have grown up in, and it so engrained that it is
common sense for us to understand, however in the text from Graeber, Debt The First 5,000
Years, it is argued that markets did not just naturally evolve into the complex market economy of
today, rather gift economies came first. Gift economies however are extremely problematic to
distinguish in the archaeological record. When giving someone a gift, it is not just the item itself,
which is easy to discover, it is also the reason why you gave a gift that is more important, but
that story and the meaning behind it will be lost to time. This is why it is so difficult to claim
definitively that a gift economy existed. All that remains are the objects, and though we are able
to project a story upon them in the sake of romance and intrigue, it is ultimately nothing more
than a story. There has been no evidence ever found that would prove without a doubt that
market economies were the soul way in which humans traded goods. Every time anthropologists
have believed that they would find this definitive proof, they have been disappointed. By actually

examining the origins of trade, money, debt, and credit a much more complex system emerges. A
system that has evolved over the millennia, but one that has never been entirely fixed to a
specific way or a specific time, always changing dynamically to suit the specific needs of human
kind at the time.
First the myth of barter must be discussed. The myth of barter is that humans first
bartered for goods. If a man had a chicken and needed some rice, he could go trade the chicken
to someone for rice. However this could become problematic if the man with the rice did not
want a chicken, he instead wanted cloth, but the man with the cloth wants wheat, so one must
barter with the man with the wheat for a chicken, take the wheat to the man with cloth and barter
for that, then take the cloth to the man with the rice in order to ultimately obtain the rice. This
was not easily completed and led to people hoarding commodities so that they could easily
barter, and carrying these large amounts of goods around was not convenient. This led to people
developing money. Money being something that could be easily exchanged for goods, and would
be universally accepted. Finally the concept of debt and credit emerged. Although this concept
seems logical, it is a myth. There is much more evidence to prove that this was not the way
markets evolved.
Anthropologists have instead discovered a much more intricate and complex system.
Although barter did happen, it was something that was rare and considered to be extremely
dangerous. Most societies appear to have been self sufficient societies that relied on the
community to produce all that was needed, and these goods were then shared across the
community. When barter did take place it would have been with other tribes, something that
would have been extremely dangerous and required a ritual to take place. Evidence of these
rituals can be found all over the world. Rituals would have been prearranged and would take

place in at a neutral ground between the tribes. The people would meet through great
apprehension; a ceremony would ensue to ease tensions, finally followed by the barter of goods,
and the tribes would depart. Ritual barter varies greatly, but with same underlying premise of
danger, and that when both receive what they came for they walk away equal without one side or
another owing debt to the other party.
Money is not just the paper or metallic coin that exists today. Currency has differed
throughout history, and greatly among the different civilizations. Money is a universally
excepted currency in which the price of an item can be exactly quantified by its use value, and a
currency can be exchanged. Money is also something that has to have credit to it. You cannot just
trade any kind of currency, there has to be some sort of credit behind it that lends to its value.
Usually this credit comes from the state. Nation states would often conquer locations, issue its
own currency, and make it the only form of payment excepted to pay taxes. Because the state
backed its currency, it lent to the credit of it.
Money has taken on many forms. Graeber goes into great detail about human currency,
skin debt, and virtual money. Human currency began as a way of valuing human life above all
else, but slowly morphed into something ugly. Through the trade of pawns, as a way to secure
ones debt, and the practice of buying brides, which were initially ways of acknowledging a debt
that could never truly be repaid because the value of a human life was so great, emerged
kidnapping, slavery, and the need to sell your children, wife, or even self as a way of settling a
debt. Although it arose as a positive process, it unfortunately ended in the slave trade,
prostitution, and skin debt. We would believe today in our high tech society that virtual money is
something of recent invention, but virtual money and systems of credit have existed throughout
time, and would emerge in times when physical currency was scarce.

Throughout time many different markets have come into existence, always adapting to a
society to cater to the needs and beliefs of the times. In our market based economy it is easy for
us to understand cultures that utilized market based economies. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and
Mesoamerica are all cultures that had market based economies and not coincidentally they are
the prehistory cultures that we know and understand above all others. Cultures like the Indus
Valley people and the Minoans had a much more complex economy that is still a mystery to the
modern world. Historically, just as today, economies and societies evolve together, growing and
changing to suit best the needs of the time.