When most of us think about the history of money, we imagine a simple timeline: people bartered goods, then invented coins, then paper money, and later moved on to cards and digital payments.
But new research suggests that this familiar story is more myth than fact.
A study led by Robert M. Rosenswig, an anthropology professor at the University at Albany, argues that ancient wooden and bone tally sticks—used independently in England, China, and the Maya world—tell a different story.
Rather than money emerging from barter, the evidence suggests that money began as a tool of governments to account for and enforce taxes and tribute.
Published in the Journal of Economic Issues, Rosenswig’s work challenges the “orthodox” economic model that dominates textbooks and introductory courses.
That model teaches that barter came first, and that money evolved to solve the problem of the “double coincidence of wants”—the difficulty of finding two people who wanted exactly what the other had to trade.
Durable items like gold, salt, or silver supposedly filled this role, becoming commodity money before evolving into today’s financial systems.
But according to Rosenswig, anthropology shows that barter was never a stage of pre-monetary society.
Instead, barter occurred only occasionally in communities that already had money, usually in times when currency was scarce or between strangers who were unlikely to trade again. It was never the foundation of entire economies.
The tally stick evidence helps make this case clear. These simple devices were split pieces of wood or bone, marked to record obligations.
What makes them significant is that they were always connected to governments, courts, or ruling authorities—institutions capable of enforcing those obligations.
In medieval England, sheriffs issued hazelwood tally sticks to record tax payments for the royal Exchequer.
Over time, some tally sticks themselves began circulating as transferable debts. In one famous case, a massive 8-foot tally recorded a loan of £1.2 million to King William III—a sum that, technically, was never repaid.
In China, beginning in the 3rd century BCE, bamboo tallies tracked grain, silk, and coin payments. Officials would split the tallies to prevent forgery, with one half kept by the state. The practice was still in use during Marco Polo’s travels in the 13th century.
In the Maya world, bone tally sticks dating from 600–900 CE show court scenes and royal rituals. These sticks were bundled with tribute items such as maize, cloth, or labor obligations owed to rulers. Like their English and Chinese counterparts, they served as records of political authority, not free-market exchanges.
Rosenswig emphasizes that these three examples come from civilizations with no direct connection, yet all used tally sticks in remarkably similar ways. This convergence suggests that the roots of money lie not in barter, but in state systems of accounting and taxation.
This rethinking of money’s origins has modern implications.
If money is a political and institutional tool rather than a scarce commodity, then governments may not be as financially constrained as often assumed. Rosenswig argues that austerity policies—based on the belief that governments must “balance their checkbooks” like households—ignore this history.
Instead, governments first spend to mobilize resources and then tax to regulate demand and inflation.
“Money is not timeless or universal,” Rosenswig concludes. “It is a political tool, and how we use it is a matter of policy, not natural law.”
By uncovering the story of tally sticks across three continents, this research invites us to rethink what money really is—and what it could be in the future.
