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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com
Researchers, including those from Göttingen University, suggest that modern behavior influences ancient economies.
A study by the Universities of Göttingen and Salento reveals that Bronze Age Europeans may have operated under a market economy, challenging the notion that such systems only arose with modern states and coinage.
What would it be like if a ‘Market Economy’ had always been in place? Researchers from the Universities of Göttingen in Germany and Salento in Italy explored this by examining the daily expenditures of people during the Bronze Age. Their findings indicate that the spending patterns of Europeans over 3,500 years ago closely resemble those of modern times. The study’s results were published in Nature Human Behaviour.
The study analyzed more than 20,000 metal objects from more than 1,000 hoards that were buried in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and Germany between around 2,300 BC and 800 BC. The researchers used a statistical technique to determine if the analyzed objects are multiples of a unit of weight. They found that starting around 1,500 BC, metal objects were intentionally fragmented in order to obtain multiples of the weight unit of roughly 10 g – a unit which was used everywhere across Europe. This indicates that metal fragments circulated as money. Then they analyzed the statistical distribution of the daily expenses of prehistoric households in prehistoric Europe – meaning they observed how much was spent in various amounts – and compared it with modern Western economies.
