The Bizarre MEGALITHIC STONE COINS of YAP, Micronesia

Megalithic money?

Ha! Yes just take a look at this –

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On a small island in the Pacific called Yap they still to this day use megalithic discs as currency. These discs can be up to 12 feet in diameter, weigh up to 4 tons and are made of Calcite. Strangely enough Calcite isn’t found on Yap and is actually transported nearly 300 miles overseas from rock quarries found on an island named Palau. Now this begs a lot of questions! Archaeologists have found that the Yap islanders have been transporting these discs from Palau since around 500 AD but were these discs present on both Yap and Palau before then? Did they have a different original use?

Let's see some more -

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On Palua where they originate from –

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Culture: Yap Day 2007



YouTube Link -

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Were the Yap the inventors of this system or did they find the discs and add there own veneration and value to them? I’m on the fence with this one and I’m still learning but I do find it quite odd that a people who chooses a currency which can be up to twice as tall as them!

What do you think?

Neat, I know a little about Yap. Never ask for a pin from a Micronesian girl to fix your zipper, while pointing at your zipper. They giggle and walk away. Pin means woman there.

Here is a picture from the net with my brother-in-law by some stone money. He moved back to Yap quite a while ago. He's a nice guy. www.tritonfilms.com...

I'd like to go there some day before he dies. My sister died about twenty years ago

a reply to: JamesTB

Id like to see the size of their wallets

I bet there is one hell of a story how these coins and island traditions started involving them.

Cool thread, thanks JamesTB

a reply to: JamesTB

Another island in the Micronesian group is Nam Madol which also has terrific mysteries surrounding the building of a city on a coral reef.

The coins do seem like wagon wheels to me though and I wondered if they could have been used for that purpose as opposed to money.

I can see that by putting stone upon stone though you could keep account of financial arrangements were the stones to have two holes aligned to the original stone somehow drilled through them. It just seems so 'desperate' when one could have followed the South American idea of simple knotting on a string.

a reply to: rickymouse

You should go as its too good to miss with relatives there before its too late and you can't make the trip.

Excellent stuff

There's an interview with a Yap Islander whose basically the man in charge of preserving the culture of the Micronesian islands. Man, even the name of the islands conjures visions of pale blue shores and white beaches...

He says:

Q : What determines the value of a piece of stone money?

There are several factors which determine the value of stone money. The first is the number of human lives that were lost on the journey to bring the stone home. The second is the kind of workmanship. Some of the more modern stones look highly polished, which has been achieved with the help of modern metal tools but they are less valuable than the ones that look less highly polished. This is because the earlier stones were finished with shell tools, which makes them more valuable. Another factor is whether the stone was dedicated to the chief who sponsored the trip to Palau. Size is also a factor, but in some cases a small stone can be more valuable than a larger stone.

Interestingly, a Western man, David O Keefe, washed ashore and managed to accelerate the importance of the tokens into an inflationary period that brought an end to the 'stone coins.'

Q: When did these voyages cease?

[...]David O'Keefe became very powerful and was even given a small island. He gained his influence by helping the Yapese to obtain their stone money more easily. He imported foreign metal tools from Hong Kong and other parts of the East so the stones could be quarried and finished more easily. And in exchange for copra which the local people sold him, he provided big ships which could transport the stones from Palau and Guam more easily. But the problem was that this ease of transportation caused the stones to be inflated and the people to reconsider whether it was valuable and whether it was important to keep bringing it to Yap. So in the end it was stopped, during the German administration.

Read the rest of the interview here (BBC)

The age of the stone token ended under inflation and they swapped over to the dollar (which is so dependable lol). It seems that whatever we regard as a paradise, human society cannot grow for long without having to invent a token value (currency) and market forces are always influencing us.

there are lots of ancient boat anchors at the bottom of the Mediterranian Sea that look a lot like those Yap Island money stones with the hole..... why would the Yap coins need a hole in it?

It wouldn't..
so I go with the Yap Island stones also being boat anchors with a hole so that a rope can be tied to the anchor

a reply to: Kandinsky

And there I was thinking, 'now that's what I call inflation-proof.'

a reply to: Kandinsky

Yeah they made a movie about O'keefe with Burt Lancaster in 1954 called, His Majesty O'Keefe
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St. Udio a good idea but a bit of problem with the size, Chinese stone anchors were round or oval while Med one were elongated and rectangular with a hole at one end (usually).

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Palau was inhabited by Negritos about 2,800 years ago and they were replaced by Sundese about a thousand years ago, no sign of any other cultures there.

site that discusses the quarries there

Study on one of the quarries - behind a pay wall but you can read the abstract

PDF on transporting the stones

originally posted by: rickymouse
Neat, I know a little about Yap. Never ask for a pin from a Micronesian girl to fix your zipper, while pointing at your zipper. They giggle and walk away. Pin means woman there.

Here is a picture from the net with my brother-in-law by some stone money. He moved back to Yap quite a while ago. He's a nice guy. www.tritonfilms.com...

I'd like to go there some day before he dies. My sister died about twenty years ago

Yep, I worked with a guy in Saudi Arabia whose name was Zibb in a country where the word zib means penis. He had a rough time.

a reply to: St Udio

I thought the holes were there for transportation purposes. They could stick a pole or log or what have you into the hole and have one guy on each side of the coin pushing the log causing the coin to roll like a wheel on an axle. So, if this interpretation is correct, then yes, they did need the holes.

They probably made grinding stones for export in ancient times; once the trade stopped and the established trade system collapsed the grinding stones took on a monetary value of their own and their true purpose as grinding stones were forgotten.

-MM

a reply to: MerkabaMeditation

Good idea but why are there no just grinding stones bound in other locations - if they were made for export?