Frozen Work

In the heart of the Pacific Ocean, a string of tiny islands forms the Micronesian nation of Yap. When I recently revisited the Smithsonian Institution, I came face to face with an artifact from this distant culture: an immense stone disk, taller than me, and etched with the marks of ancient tools. This was a rai stone, a peculiar kind of currency that the Yapese used for centuries. As I stood beside the stone, its weathered surface dwarfing me, I couldn't help think about the strange and complex history of money.

Rai stones are not like the coins in your pocket or the digits in your bank account. They are enormous disks of limestone, some as large as 12 feet in diameter, and they are unable to be physically exchanged like conventional money. Instead, the Yapese track and orally transfer ownership of the stones, even when they are too large to move. In the same way that the central banks of Europe during the Victorian era quickly realized that it was silly to transfer physical gold bric…