The Wandering Scot

An occasional travel journal

Tag: Yap

  • Yap: Land of Stone Money

    Last week I was on Palau, where I visited a Yapese quarry site. Today I’m 280 miles away on Yap itself, inspecting the resulting money hoards.

    There are hundred of surviving “coins”, ranging from 2′ to 8′ across. Some are held communally and displayed in village Money Banks. Some are held by families and displayed in front of houses.

    Among the surviving stones, a very few seem to be shiny marble-like rock and maybe that’s how the whole craze started. But many seem to be rather dull gray, even under the weathered surface.

    The true history of the stone money is hard to figure out. They seem to have originated about 500 years ago as rare prestige items, obtained with great effort and great risk from across an ocean voyage. As with many status items, there seems to have been a subsequent social one-upmanship pressure to obtain more, bigger, and better ones.

    Presumably the prestige came from the great effort of having quarried and fetched them all the way from Palau. So when David O’Keefe started mass production and importing in the late 19th c, the prestige evaporated and the bottom dropped out of the market.  I suspect many of the larger surviving coins are from the O’Keefe phase, but it’s hard to tell.

    P.S.  Since I had been a good and diligent tourist, my hotel rewarded me with a Stone Money Cookie with my lunchtime coffee.  🙂

  • Palau: Stone Money Quarry

    I’m on the Pacific island nation of Palau.  Today I was out at the Yapese Quarry at Metuker er a Bisech, where centuries ago brave seafarers from Yap came to quarry out limestone for use as Stone Money.

    One giant piece of money was damaged on the way down from the quarry and lies abandoned. Higher up the trail is a large limestone cave that was supposedly the quarry site.  This has fine stalactites and other scenic limestone formations.  The money was either quarried here or (more likely) on limestone outcrops nearby.

    Centuries back, carving out the stone money and transporting it across 280 miles of open ocean by canoe to Yap was a very arduous and risky venture, justifying the high prestige value associated with the stone money. But by the latter half of the 19th century, modern metal tools and sailing ships made the money both much easier to quarry and much easier to transport. So there was a boom in production. And then an inevitable bust, as the supply outweighed the demand and the perceived value of new money fell.

    Practicalities: You need a boat and guide to reach the quarry.  I had trouble finding a tour company which could arrange this for me.  I thought I had made a reservation with Palau Explorer, but that fell through.  So this morning I went into the Palau Visitors Authority office, who were really helpful.  They contacted an operator and arranged a private tour “if you can leave right now!” for $150.  When I went to the pickup point, it turned out the operator was actually the same Palau Explorer who I’d been trying to contact originally.  Oh well, I guess they had some kind of scheduling conflict.  Anyway, the trip worked out fine in the end!