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When we picture the history of money, many imagine barter leading naturally to coins, then paper bills, then cards and digital balances. But new research led by University at Albany Anthropology Professor Robert M. Rosenswig shows that this familiar narrative doesn't hold up—and that lessons from ancient wooden and bone tally sticks matter for how we understand money today.

His conclusion: Orthodox economics, which treats money primarily as a medium of exchange, does not fit the evidence. Tally sticks, he argues, suggest that money originates with governments as a system of accounting and taxation.

Rosenswig's study, "Ancient Tally Sticks Explain the Nature of Modern Government Money," in the Journal of Economic Issues, shows that tally sticks—independently invented in England, China and the Maya world—were consistently used by state officials to record and cancel tax or tribute obligations.

"The historical record shows that barter doesn't precede the creation of financial money," Rosenswig said. "Tally sticks remind us that money is not a scarce commodity but an accounting system rooted in political authority."

Reassessing money's origins

The dominant economic story is simple and intuitive: Humans bartered before money existed. Markets, the argument goes, needed a universal medium of exchange to overcome the "double coincidence of wants," so durable items like gold or salt became commodity money. This explanation remains widely taught to Econ 101 students. As : "Barter was the first form of commerce, and money was invented to solve the inefficiencies of barter."

Rosenswig notes that this story is the basis of "orthodox models," which see markets as self-regulating and governments as interfering with the efficient function of markets.

"Anthropologists have long demonstrated that barter was never a pre-monetary system," said Rosenswig. "Instead, barter appeared only in societies with existing monetary systems when formal currency was scarce or between strangers for one-off exchanges—not as the foundation of whole economies."

Tally sticks, he argues, show how states mobilizing resources through accounting systems backed by taxation, fitting into a broader pattern where different forms of money arose to meet different needs, from wampum beads in the Americas to Roman coins in Britain.

"What ties these cases together was not barter, but political authority to enforce obligations through accounting," said Rosenswig.

The current study compares how tally sticks were used across three very different civilizations.

In England, sheriffs issued hazelwood sticks to record tax obligations for the Exchequer. By the 14th century, "assignment tallies" circulated in ways similar to state-issued debt. One surviving 8-foot stick even records a £1.2 million loan to William III—a debt technically never repaid.

In China, beginning in the 3rd century BCE, bamboo tallies were split by "knife-and-brush officials" to track grain, silk and coin payments. Marco Polo later described the practice in the 1200s during the Yuan Dynasty, centuries after it began. Their durability and resistance to forgery made them ideal for tribute accounting.

In the Maya world, bone tally sticks appear in the Late Classic (600–900 CE), painted with court scenes and royal burials. Bundled with other tribute items, they symbolized obligations owed to rulers—maize, textiles or labor—not market transactions.

"These examples are powerful because they come from societies with no historical connection," Rosenswig said. "Yet each of these civilizations independently developed tally sticks as a way to mobilize resources through state authority."

If money's origin is fundamentally an institutional, political accounting system rather than a product of barter markets, it could change how we think about fiscal policy today, Rosenswig suggests. He argues that austerity policies, premised on the idea that governments face strict financial limits—like households needing to balance their checkbooks—lack historical support. Instead, governments spend first, then tax to manage inflation and demand.

"Once unshackled from the orthodox assertion that financial money is primarily a medium of exchange," said Rosenswig, "fiscally sovereign governments are free to help the working men and women who elected them during the inevitable downturns of our modern capitalist economy."

For Rosenswig, this is also a reminder of anthropology's role in public debate. "Studying the past reminds us that money is not timeless or universal in form," he said. "It is a political tool, and how we choose to use it today is a matter of policy, not natural law."

This new study builds on Rosenswig's distinguishing social, government and private forms of money, reinforcing the idea that financial systems are embedded in political authority.