On Yap, a giant stone coin at the bottom of the sea still changed hands.
The islanders of Yap treasured carved limestone discs, some twice the height of a person and weighing four tonnes. Big ones were rarely moved. Ownership lived in shared memory instead. When one sank during transport, everyone agreed it was still there, and it went on being traded.
Rai stones, also called fei, are discs of crystalline calcite with a hole in the middle, made by the people of the Yap islands in Micronesia. Most are between 30 and 50 centimetres across, but the largest surviving one, on Rumung island, is 3.6 metres wide and weighs about 4,000 kilograms. Around 6,000 large stones remain on Yap today.
Yap has no suitable rock of its own. The stone was quarried in the caves of Palau, about 400 kilometres away, and expeditions of young men could spend years there before bringing stones home by canoe or on rafts left to drift with the currents. Men sometimes died on the way, and a stone's value depended not only on its size and craftsmanship but on its story: who brought it, and whether lives were lost carrying it.
Because the big stones were too heavy and fragile to move, ownership was settled by agreement. Each stone carried an oral history listing its past owners, and adding a new name was the transfer. The stones were used for weighty occasions such as marriages, inheritances, political deals and alliances. After Europeans arrived with iron tools and ships in the 19th century, much larger stones were made, but these newer ones were valued less than the old.
In a 1991 paper Milton Friedman argued this was not so strange: the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York can move gold between governments without it ever leaving the room. Not everyone accepts the neat parable. A 2022 paper by Jo Lindsay Walton argued that Western accounts of Yapese stone money often contain errors, and tend to tell us more about the economists' own debates than about Yap.
Source: Wikipedia — Rai stones · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
