Tag: Premonetary Means of Payment

From gold to silver, feathers, pearls and bracelets: people have used so much different means of payment in the human history. An exhibition in the Monnaie de Paris Museum shows the whole range of them.

Really big pieces of money have often been treated as “curiosities” and overlooked in favor of shiny gold coins and crisp modern banknotes. As the stars of a new exhibition in the Smithsonian, they will do the heavy lifting as curator Ellen Feingold explains.

Masterpieces from Peru’s ancient cultures can be seen in the British Museum. For this major exhibition over 40 remarkable objects have come from Peru, among them a stunning 2,500-year-old gold headdress.

Rolf Denk’s book is an important contribution to the research on the trade and use of manillas. Manillas were used as a form of currency in trade with West Africa, including in the slave trade. Ursula Kampmann takes a look at the work.

The Monnaie de Paris dedicates a special exhibition to barter in West Africa. One focus is on the Ashanti people, who used gold dust to carry out transactions until the 20th century.

One part of the Kagin’s ANA National Money Show Auction is the Ken Hallenbeck Collection of traditional Money that features among other rarities a selection of the stone money of Yap and Feather Money from the Santa Cruz Islands.

A new display at the British Museum focuses on how colonial objects from Solomon Islands came to be in the Museum’s collection in London. Among these objects visitors will find some pre-monetary forms of money like local shell-money beads.