Guy Swan (4:21)
Whatever you call it, it's older than markets. Long before any efficient marketplace existed, people faced recurring high stakes transactions, tribute, inheritance, compensation for injury or death, reparations, bride price. Such crucial life events often arrive without warning in the form of a death, a crime, a conquest, a marriage. What is sometimes called money. What we shall, due to its oldest forms being partly alien to us, call collectibles distills and stores value, a desire shared across the vagaries of time and individuals with terse symbolism. Such objects can also communicate persistent rights and obligations. But the main function of collectibles is usually storing and on certain crucial occasions, transferring value, stitching together desires and events in space and in time. Three days later, as fog burned off the water, Hukoi's relatives moved upriver in narrow canoes. Faces were darkened with charcoal, not for concealment so much as resolve. They carried bows of yew, quivers of reed, arrows tipped with obsidian, and long knives at their waists. The problem is finding something the intended beneficiary would want. Whenever, unpredictably, the event happens, the moment arrives. That unpredictable event might be somebody else's desires, an exchange, but it often is instead a crucial event that calls for, among other responses, transfer of wealth. To stitch together the separated times and places of desires and events, an object must above all be be a good store of value. The objects best suited to perform such stitching are the most durable, divisible, and trust minimized among all objects Peoples before the ages of metal could make. Shells optimized these properties. The economist Karl Manger argued that money emerged from barter markets. He was correct to theorize that money, what we call collectibles, emerged naturally from the difficulty of matching desires to what one has available to transfer. But collectibles predate markets by tens of thousands of years. The problems they solved included the transfer of wealth during crucial life events, not just desires for goods and services, and were older and more important than the problem of inefficient trading. They landed near Panal's village at dawn. A dog barked, someone shouted. Then the air snapped with the sound of bowstrings. Arrows struck the walls of plank houses thudded into posts, shattered against stones. One man fell near the waterline, clutching his thigh. Another staggered back with a shaft through his shoulder. Painal himself emerged with a shield of elk hide, calling for his men to hold their ground. The many needs to stitch together desires and events in time and space, along with the ability to do so with durable and trust minimized objects, leads to cultures evolving something that carries value across time and space. Objects valued by some for practical or even superficial reasons can evolve into objects deeply valued by all in a culture for their stitching ability. The clash lasted less than an hour. By evening, the talking began. Elders and skilled speakers met on a gravel bar between the villages, a place neutral enough to hold anger without igniting it. The wounded were named. The canoe was discussed. Voices rose, then steadied. Each side counted its losses not only in blood but in standing. Each fact carried weight. At last Panal spoke differently. He did not yield the argument, but he shifted its ground. He offered payment, not as admission of guilt but as a way to end the matter. From a deerskin bundle, his relatives brought out strings of dentalium shells. Long, pale, carefully graded by length and perfection, they gleamed softly in the fading light. Shells and, much later, precious metals strung into necklaces for safe storage and easy division, stitched together events and desires not because any leader decreed them valuable, but because their scarcity and their durability made them perpetually ready and on hand when struck. Everybody came to find that valuable. Many other kinds of durable and trust minimized. Objects have evolved into collectibles, but shells were the most common. On a gravel bar between the two villages, shells were measured against forearm tattoos and counted aloud. Longer shells for the injury, additional strands for the insult, a final measure for the disturbance of peace. Huay Koi's family conferred in low voices the amount was not small. It acknowledged harm without surrendering pride. Finally, Wei Koy lifted the strings so all could see and nodded. The canoe was returned. The reparations had been paid. The war was over.
