Exploring the vast anthropological and archaeological scholarship on money, this chapter lays out an approach to early money. Examining what it is we refer to when we talk about money, and what effect it supposedly has on society, it becomes clear that money can be diverse and does not have a set effect on society. Rather, the significance of money depends on the social and cultural logic in which its use is embedded. Arguing from this perspective, a distinction between primitive and modern forms of money – or equivalents, such as special-purpose and general-purpose money, or indigenous currencies and state money, with coinage representing modern/general-purpose/state-issued money – is rejected as arbitrary and not conducive to a better understanding of early money preceding coinage. Instead, money is conceptualized as being a commodity and a token at the same time. This is then applied to the material that is placed at the centre of this study – the cut and broken precious metal items generally known as hacksilber and hackgold – thereby substantiating an understanding of this material as a form of money, still preceding coinage.

This chapter introduces students to the study of morphology. We look in a preliminary way at the difficulty inherent in defining what we mean by a word and introduce the term morpheme. We introduce the basic concepts of simple versus complex words. Students learn the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes. We end with a brief introduction to the difference between inflection and derivation.