Oldest Coins from North America

Discussion in 'Coin Chat' started by Endeavor, Jun 3, 2020.

  1. Endeavor

    Endeavor Well-Known Member

    I was watching videos on youtube about how there have been humans on the North American continent for thousands of years. It had me wondering if any of these earlier societies created money in the form of coins.

    I always see ancient coins from Asia and Europe but never from North America. Not surprised to see so many from Eurasia as all the evidence points to these civilizations being more advanced compared to other continents but did any ancient civilizations outside of these use coins?

    I'm especially interested in knowing if there are any archeological finds of ancient coins in North America.
     
    kaparthy likes this.
  2. Avatar

    Guest User Guest



    to hide this ad.
  3. medoraman

    medoraman Supporter! Supporter

    Closest I am aware of are the "Hoe money" of Mexico and Ecuador. It seems Ecuador traded copper with Mexico, and when the Mexican indians started making hoe coins with it, the indians from Ecuador copied the idea. I have only ever seen one auction lot of the Ecuador examples. Luckily I own it, it comprise about 35 coins in three different denominations. I also own all Mexican examples.
     
    TuckHard, kaparthy and Endeavor like this.
  4. John Burgess

    John Burgess Well-Known Member

    North America...... I guess it would be Wampum. The best known form of money among the native Americans north of Mexico was wampum, made out of the shells of a type of clam.

    In the form of coins,,,,, would be the colonists and colonial coinage, but not other countries coinage, uniquely North American. Mexico would have used Spains coins until their first ones in the 1860s I think.

    So Yeah, likely colonial coinage is the oldest there is. Remember, the U.S. is 243 years old, Canada is 150 years old.

    before that it was other countries coinage, and the Native Americans Wampum.

    There aren't much ancient coins in North America or South America because the natives that inhabited the lands didn't use coinage in trade.

    Some ancient Roman coins have turned up in Like Texas or Maine, or South America in Native burial mounds that date to about 800 AD, but again, no idea how they got there or when, or why they were there except maybe they found them interesting as art and had run acroos romans at some point somehow.

    The Americas really didn't do "Ancient" coins. the Natives didnt' use coins. even "Aztec hoe money" which would be considered ancient for the Americas is from the 1500s.
     
    kaparthy and Endeavor like this.
  5. YoloBagels

    YoloBagels Well-Known Member

    From my brief research, the Aztecs many times used cocoa beans and a currency named "Quachtli" for trade. Quachtli were essentially pieces of cloth that hosted some kind of decorative design, sometimes patterns, sometimes images of religious rituals or historic events. Sounds closer to paper money than coins.

    Also apparently in some instances children were used as stakes in trade.
     
    kaparthy and Endeavor like this.
  6. medoraman

    medoraman Supporter! Supporter

    Oh, humans were very much used in barter trades. One hoe money was equal to one slave according to some research.

    I didn't include cacao beans, cloth, etc due to lack of durability. Wampum to a lesser extent, (how do you prove it was of period?), and Hoe money are about the only durable "coins". The hoe money can be proven based upon copper chemical composition, it is well known what impurities are in it.
     
    kaparthy, Endeavor and YoloBagels like this.
  7. J.T. Parker

    J.T. Parker Well-Known Member

    I thought there had always been 'ho' money!
    I stand corrected,
    J.T.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2020
    Kentucky likes this.
  8. Kentucky

    Kentucky Supporter! Supporter

    According to another thread, even pre-historic civilizations had money :)
     
  9. John Burgess

    John Burgess Well-Known Member

    I saw something about large feathers with clear quills (turkey eagle or condor maybe?) filled with gold dust and used as money... the inca's or mayans maybe? It was something like that. Was a while back and don't quite remember. Also chunks of copper or tin.

    There was always a medium of exchange with any grouping of people that could be considered a society, but coins.... not until the 1500's AD I think anywhere in the Americas.
     
    kaparthy and Endeavor like this.
  10. Conder101

    Conder101 Numismatist

    The Hoe money is probably the earliest, The Spanish had a mint striking silver coin in mexico in 1538, after that the next earliest is the Bermuda Hogge coins of 1616. The first coins struck in North America were the NE shillings and fractional parts in 1652. So no ancients, not even "medieval"
     
    kaparthy and Endeavor like this.
  11. Endeavor

    Endeavor Well-Known Member

    Thank you everyone for your contributions. I learned from the comments.
     
    kaparthy likes this.
  12. kaparthy

    kaparthy Well-Known Member

    See "Curious Currency" by Robert Leonard, reviewed here on CoinTalk:
    https://www.cointalk.com/threads/book-review-curious-currency-by-robert-leonard.337168/
    Curious Currency Cover.jpeg
    Aztec patolquechtli (cloth pieces)
    Cacoa beans as money antedates even the Mayans. The Aztecs inherited the practice.
    A bit more about the Ecuadoran axes and their extent over space and time is there, also.

    In addition, if you research the copper country of Michigan, you will find that Keewanau copper has been found in Native American mounds along the Mississippi and in Georgia dating to the Middle Woodland 200 CE up to the 1100s. Those finds include seashells, apparently some from the Pacific region, indicating far-reaching trade networks.

    On this subject of "trade" we have to be careful. Money as we know and love it is a very modern and very restricted cultural attribute. We look at Sumer or China or the Greeks and think that these behaviors were universal since the stone age. None of that is true. For many people -- even after the invention of coinage -- coins, money, precious goods, were not intended for economic calculation but for ritual gift exchange. The seashells from the Pacific, the copper from Keewanau, the tobacco pipes and all that, they were meant to seal friendships, relationships, marriages.

    Coins themselves are somewhat peculiar. It is cogent that in the Bible, payments are recorded as earrings or bracelets of so many shekel weights.

    Wampum in particular was also a unique invention. In his seminal book on primitive money numismatist Charles J. Optiz follows ethnologists in attributing the invention of wampum to Dekanawidah, the Great Peacemaker. The intense labor required to make just one bead was enough to create the perceived value in the gift. The beads were not intended for financial calculation but for ritual gift exchange in peacemaking.

    Also, I read that when Columbus bumped into Natives, they had no interest in gold, having enough of it for decoration, but being very interested in the copper (brass; bronze) fittings of their clothing.
     
    Endeavor and RonSanderson like this.
  13. kaparthy

    kaparthy Well-Known Member

    I am not sure what you mean by that. Any coinage was accepted pretty much anywhere until the modern era of hard national boundaries. Even so, when the Eastern European nations broke out from under the USSR, Slovenia, for example, adopted the Deutschmark. In colonial times, in America, Islamic gold was known and accepted. It came to America by way of pirates. As we know, Mexican and other Spanish silver and gold was legal tender here until 1857. The only reasons that Mexico did not have a reciprocal situation is that they were massive exporters of silver coin and their economy was always in a shambles. So, they did not need to rely on a plethora of foreign coinages. The US Mint published a report on the values of foreign gold and silver coins. Reprints are common among numismatists.
    (What's with the commas,,,,,?)

    When I lived in Albuquerque in 2002-2003, a woman came to the coin club one night with a Roman coin. Her home was on the Rio Grande and she wondered how the coin came there. Before I could speak up, a couple of people pointed to the club president because he was a high school history teacher. He said that the coin was probably dropped by some pioneer and was not the result of Romans in New Mexico. I tried to talk to her, but she was satisfied and left. If you look at the distribution of Roman coin finds, they are not random, but clustered along the Eastern coast and rivers. When that coin was struck, the Rio Grande was wet all the way up.
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  14. physics-fan3.14

    physics-fan3.14 You got any more of them.... prooflikes?

    I'm actually reading a very interesting book on that subject right now: https://www.amazon.com/Ethnographic-Study-Traditional-Money-Descriptions/dp/1887930116

    At various times throughout the history of North (and South) America, there were a wide variety of items used as currency: knives, guns, hides, beads, shells, wampum, abalone, cacao, and a host of other items. Many of these items were locally produced and traded with villages/tribes nearby. Some of these items were produced by Europeans or Settlers specifically for trade with native tribes. Thus, in the mid-Atlantic, wampum was used. In California, abalone shells were used. In northern areas, beaver hides were used.

    But no, before Europeans came to shore, coins were not minted in North America.
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  15. kaparthy

    kaparthy Well-Known Member

    I remembered that, also. It was easy to find a reference.

    Screen Shot 2020-06-03 at 5.40.52 PM.png
    Google Books.
    A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency
    By A. Hingston Quiggin (Routledge, 1949).
    https://books.google.com/books?id=iRIwDwAAQBAJ
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  16. Randy Abercrombie

    Randy Abercrombie Supporter! Supporter

    I’ll throw a monkey in the mix. I cannot find it, but unless I dreamed this I am sure I read a thread long ago where @lordmarcovan dug an ancient Roman coin on a metal detecting hunt..... In southwest Georgia!!! So even if we had explorers from the Roman Empire on our shores 2000 years ago, what need would they have to bring their coinage with them?
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  17. medoraman

    medoraman Supporter! Supporter

    Roman coins are very common in harbors in North America due to ship ballast being dumped. Much of where they dug up the ballast in Europe was soil that could have contained Roman coins. I am convinced most came here that way, the rest as curios carried by Europeans here.

    I still resist those who say coins were not native to North America. The Aztec hoes were of a standard weight, used throughout a large area as a medium of exchange, was a symbolic tool, with no useful purpose except as money. The only thing missing from modern coins is mark of governmental issuance. However, the earliest coins in the world also lacked this. So what is the difference between Aztec hoe money and Lydian issues, or early Chinese spades?
     
    Endeavor and Randy Abercrombie like this.
  18. physics-fan3.14

    physics-fan3.14 You got any more of them.... prooflikes?

    For many regions of the world, the "hoes" or "axes" or "knives" that were traded were originally intended to be hoes and axes and knives. They were traded because they were valuable tools. Once traded, they were used to clear a field or cut a tree. That's the reason they had value. As trade progressed, the hoe or axe took on a more representational form and lost its usefullness - it became a unit of currency.

    In contrast, the original Lydian coins had only a single purpose - as a unit of value. Their entire reason for existence was currency and trade.

    To some collectors there is a distinction. To some collectors, any unit or item that was used to facilitate commerce could be considered a "coin". Some collectors prefer the standard round-ish metal piece stamped by an issuing governance... some collectors enjoy the opposite.
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  19. medoraman

    medoraman Supporter! Supporter

    I understand, but by the time these civilizations used them extensively in trade they became so small and thin as to be useless for any other purpose. That explains the shape, but does not determine if it meets the definition of coinage. Early electrum were simply punched striated lumps of electrum, the same commodity electrum traded daily the month before. So why is that striated electrum lump a "coin", yet a small thin piece of copper not? Neither have marks of value, neither have any value save for metal content.

    It just seems pretty Eurocentric to say one is a "coin", the other something lesser. From the Chinese spades derived one of the greatest series of coinage on earth, the cash. Something similar probably would have evolved from the Aztecs had the Conquistadors not happened.
     
    Endeavor likes this.
  20. Kentucky

    Kentucky Supporter! Supporter

    I search for the ones with the C mint mark for Croatoan... :)
     
    lordmarcovan likes this.
  21. lordmarcovan

    lordmarcovan Eclectic & Eccentric Moderator

    RomanMidwayFind800x425-brightened.jpg

    Your memory serves you well, except I didn't technically dig it, and didn't even have a metal detector with me that day. (And this is SE coastal Georgia, not SW.)

    I picked it right up off the top of the ground, where it had recently washed out of an old sand road. Though the coin was circa 390s AD, the context it was found in was colonial/antebellum (i.e., mid-1700s to early-1800s). There was a gunflint and some pottery with it. I have little doubt that it lay in that sand a century or two before I found it, but not for 1600 years.
     
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2020
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page