Ialongo and Lago analysed nearly 25,000 objects from hoards in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany dating from the full 1,500-year span of the Bronze Age. They found that, over the centuries, a standardised weight system emerged that was widely shared across the Bronze Age world.

The paper goes on to argue this standardisation indicates that small pieces of bronze of standard weights could have been used as currency for everyday transactions by ordinary people.

What is money, anyway?

There are many views about what money is and what it does for different societies, both today and in the deep past.

Many modern economists focus on money’s usefulness in transactions as a medium of exchange. This emphasises market-based buying and selling.

Other economists apply “chartalist” theory (taken from the Latin word for “token”) to emphasise money as a unit of account. In this view, money can be used for “social accounting”, to keep track of socially important activities such as gifts, debts, tributes and offerings. This is not just a historical idea, as even some modern debts function through social collateral.

The distinction between these two views of money may seem like splitting hairs, but it points to a profound disagreement.

Standardisation also has many uses beyond social cohesion and economics. For example, Bronze Age smiths needed careful control of proportions of different metals (copper, tin, antimony, lead and others) to make different kinds of bronze for use in their sophisticated metalworking. We don’t know exactly how they achieved this control, but Sumerian texts from the same time period tell us Sumerian smiths did it by weight.