Gift & Reciprocity
Things moved long before there were prices. What Marcel Mauss described in The Gift (1925) is that a present carries three obligations built into it: to give, to receive, and to repay. Failing to return a gift did not decline the gift; it declined the relationship. In the kula exchange recorded by Malinowski, white shell armbands travel counter-clockwise and red shell necklaces clockwise around eighteen islands, forever. The holder is only a temporary keeper — holding on brings no honour. A gift arrives with an invisible promise attached: someday, something back. Both of this map's rivers flow out of that long eve.
The myth, corrected
Barter was inconvenient, so money was invented
Anthropology does not support the sequence economics textbooks told for so long. Caroline Humphrey of Cambridge wrote in 1985 that no example of a pure barter economy has ever been described, and no case of money emerging from one. David Graeber argued in Debt that the order runs the other way — records of credit first, coinage much later. Graeber has his critics, so this map says «according to anthropologists» rather than stating it flat. Note that barter itself is not what is being denied. What is denied is the story in which strangers ran an economy on barter alone, and money grew out of it.