Engaging with money in a northern periphery of early modern Europe

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2012 12: 287Journal of Social ArchaeologyVesa-Pekka Herva, Risto Nurmi and James Symonds

Engaging with money in a northern periphery of early modern Europe

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Article

Engaging with money ina northern periphery ofearly modern Europe

Vesa-Pekka HervaCultural Heritage Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland

Risto NurmiDepartment of Archaeology, University of Oulu, Finland

James SymondsDepartment of Archaeology, University of York, UK

Abstract

While contextual and interpretive approaches to money have recently emerged in

archaeology, coins have attracted little serious attention in the post-medieval archae-

ology of the western world. The relative neglect of coins as archaeological finds prob-

ably derives from an (implicit) assumption that the function and meaning of coins is

readily apparent.

A close study of coin finds, however, combined with various sources of contextual

data, can provide new views on how people understood and engaged with coinage even

in the comparatively recent past, as this article seeks to illustrate by considering money

and coin finds from a northern periphery of early modern Sweden. Economic factors

are important for appreciating the significance of coinage and the patterning of the

studied coin finds, but this article proposes that non-monetary uses of coins were

more important to the local understanding of money than has previously been

recognized.

Keywords

coins, copper coinage, early modern Sweden, folk beliefs, money

Corresponding author:

Vesa-Pekka Herva, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, P.O.Box 59, FI-00014

University of Helsinki, Finland.

Email: [email protected]



Introduction

Given that money has played an important role in the development of themodern western world and its institutions, including the growth of capitalism,there is a certain irony that coin finds have been given little serious thought inpost-medieval or modern world historical archaeology. A main reason for theneglect of coins is probably that their function and meanings are considered self-evident: coins are money and money, supposedly, is a standardized medium ofexchange (Myrberg, 2010: 157). This characteristically modern view that literallytakes coins ‘on face value’ is, however, problematic when studying money incontexts other than the contemporary western world. Although scholars havetended to project modern western notions of money onto money in general,and ancient coinage in particular, money can only be properly understood inrelation to the broader cultural matrix in which it exists and is put to use(Bloch and Parry, 1989: 1).

This article considers money in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden,which is now part of Finland (Figure 1), focusing specifically on how people under-stood and engaged with coins, and how attitudes to money were linked to broaderideas of materiality and everyday life. When the first towns were founded on thenorthernmost rim of the Baltic Sea in the early seventeenth century, coinage stillplayed a minor role in the economic life of local farming communities, even thoughit had been known for some centuries. The amount of money in circulation wasnonetheless increased and coinage became more commonly used in this northernperiphery. Yet money in the early modern period was in many ways fundamentallydifferent from money today, as was the world in general, and it is against thisbackground that the uses and understanding of coins and coinage are consideredin this article.

The article begins with and centres on seventeenth- and eighteenth-centurycoins which are fairly common finds at early modern sites in Sweden – includingFinland, which was a province of Sweden until 1809 – but rarely studied asarchaeological finds and material culture. Apart from their obvious use astools for dating contexts, ordinary coin finds have been of limited interest inthe post-medieval archaeology of Finland and Sweden. One probable reasonfor that neglect, as mentioned above, is the supposedly self-evident function ofcoins. Secondly, millions of coins were minted in Sweden during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries and those coins are well known and documented bycollectors and others, so the study of archaeological coin finds may appear tohave little to offer. Thirdly, it seems to be assumed that in circumstances otherthan deliberate hoarding, coins ended up in archaeological deposits mainlythrough casual loss, which undermines the perceived usefulness of coin findsfor the study of the post-medieval past. A close study of coin finds, however,combined with various sources of contextual data, can provide new insights intohow people understood and engaged with money. It will be argued that

288 Journal of Social Archaeology 12(3)



non-monetary and belief-related uses of coins must be considered not as separatefrom some supposed ‘actual’ or ‘proper’ function of coinage, but rather as inte-gral to a culturally embedded understanding of coinage in a northern peripheryof early modern Europe.

Figure 1. The six sites discussed in the article (Oulu, Hailuoto, Tornio, Oravaisensaari,

Kainuunkyla, Ylikyla) are located in present-day north-western Finland. The circles mark urban

sites, squares rural sites, and the triangle a church site.

Herva et al. 289



Views on money, markets, and monetization

It has been suggested that money markets first appeared in Greece, and morespecifically Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC (Polanyi et al., 1957).John Collis has argued that the eventual spread of low-value bronze coinage towestern Europe, initially to central Gaul in the first century AD, created ‘a new wayof life’ where the social function of high value metals such as gold and silver asprestige gifts was forced to incorporate a new level of everyday small-scaleexchanges in markets using copper and bronze coins (Collis, 1971: 77). Collis’sfunctional and theoretical interpretation of late Iron Age coinage in Britainaimed to re-think the pseudo-historical explanatory models which were prevalentin the 1970s, and which saw the spread of uninscribed low-value coinage to south-ern Britain as evidence of invasion or colonization by Gaulish refugees, and thelater appearance of inscribed coins as evidence of tribal expansion and politicalconsolidation (Allen, 1958).

Economic and functionalist explanations for coin distributions have held swayever since. The apparent increase in the rate of accidental loss of small value coppercoins in Roman Britain after c.AD 260, for example, has been explained in terms ofa down-turn in the market value of such coins. Whereas gold and silver coins aregenerally thought to have retained their value in the Roman world, copper coins,which had only a token value, became debased, and, according to Reece, ‘almostaccidentally’ came to be of use to everyday small-scale transactions: ‘copper coinsran down to a minimal size, which we find fiddly, scrappy, worthless, deplorable,almost indecent as money, yet which the market stalls may have found very useful’(1988: 52–53).

The dominance of economic approaches notwithstanding, cultural and socialdimensions of money have also been addressed in various historical and culturalcontexts over the last 20 years or so (e.g. Lauer, 2008; Parry and Bloch, 1989;Zelizer, 1989). In archaeology, non-monetary functions of money have mainlybeen considered in the contexts of classical, early medieval, or medieval Europe(e.g. Casey, 1986; Casey and Reece, 1974; Clarke and Schia, 1989; Creighton, 2000;Garipzanov, 2005; Kurke, 1999; Papadopoulos, 2002; Reece, 2003; Theuws, 2004).More symbolic explanations for the possible intentional disposal of copper coinshave arisen, for example, from work on late Iron Age sites in the Netherlands,where Kok has suggested that the physical qualities and colours of objects and thepresence of deities on Roman coins acted as a factor determining their choice fordeposition as ceremonial offerings (2008: 133). An investigation into the use ofcopper coinage at Songo Mnara, on the Swahili coast of East Africa, has similarlyrevealed ‘a rich world of symbolism that goes beyond the simple use of coppercoins for ‘‘petty exchange’’’, suggesting that coins bearing images of particularlypowerful or famous sultans remained in use for a long time as they were thought tobe linked to the power of the sultan (Wynne-Jones and Fleisher, 2012: 34).

Myrberg’s (2008, 2010) recent research on early medieval coinage on the BalticSea island of Gotland is worth mentioning in particular because it engages with




several themes that are also at the heart of the present article. Myrberg emphasizesthat modern ideas of money should not be projected onto an essentially non-monetized society and stresses the importance of studying coins as material culture,with due attention to archaeological context and the biographies of coins.Kemmers and Myrberg also make the important point, with which we wish toengage, that the archaeological study of coins and coinage has the capacity to‘offer profound insights not only into matters of economy and the ‘‘big history’’of issuers and state organization but also into ‘‘small histories’’, cultural values andthe agency of humans and objects’ (2011: 87).

Coinage in medieval and later Sweden and beyond

Coins begin to appear in some numbers in southern Scandinavia and Finlandduring the Viking Age in the late first millennium AD (e.g. Jonsson, 2005;Talvio, 2009). While the earliest coin minting in Sweden dates back to aroundAD 1000, only a limited number of coins were in circulation early in the secondmillennium (Tingstrom, 1972: 8–9). The role and significance of coinage in theeconomies of the medieval Nordic countries has been a matter of interest anddebate (e.g. Gullbekk, 2005; Klackenberg, 1992), but coins were arguably incommon use in Sweden by the fourteenth century (Von Heijne, 2009: 161, 171–176). The activities of the Hanseatic League intensified trade on the Gulf ofBothnia around the same time and coinage became more common on the periph-eral northern shores of the Gulf; however, northern trade continued to be basedprimarily on exchange and the significance of coinage to the local economy waslimited until the eighteenth century (Nurmi, 2011: 119–120 with references).

The minting of coins increased in Sweden from the fifteenth century onwards,when the Crown started to demand that taxes should be paid in cash (Luukko,1954: 234; Nurmi, 2011: 119–120; Virrankoski, 1973: 519). Sweden, like many otherEuropean states, wrestled with a shortage of cash in the early modern period, andvarious measures were taken to solve this problem, ranging from the sponsoring ofalchemists to the invention of ‘credit coinage’ in the later seventeenth century(Wennerlind, 2003). The first banknotes in Europe were introduced in Sweden inthe early 1660s and were developed from tokens used by mining companies(Hyotyniemi, 1978: 184–186; Lappalainen, 2007: 100–101; Nurmi, 2011: 123).

The adoption of banknotes marked a significant step towards a ‘modern’ idea ofmoney, as money now came to represent value instead of ‘carrying’ it in the form ofthe material that money was made of. Money, as Simmel (1992[1900]) hasobserved, became a matter of social trust and contributed to broader culturaland social changes. Money arguably played an important role in the birth of themodern world because it promoted larger-scale rationalization and standardiza-tion, which included measuring in standard units and the prioritizing of quantitiesover qualities (Zelizer, 1989: 344–348). ‘The introduction of credit-money’, writesWennerlind, ‘mirrored the transition toward a mechanical worldview, in whichhumans had claimed center stage. The economy had now been emancipated

Herva et al. 291



from the neo-Platonic nature-universe complex, and humankind had acquired thepower to manage and control its own affairs’ (2003: 255).

This grand narrative of how money changed the world has been subject tocritique (e.g. Bloch and Parry, 1989; Maurer, 2006), but we do not wish toengage with that debate here. The important point is simply that money, as it isunderstood today, is a relatively recent development and that present-day notionsof coinage must not be assumed to be automatically valid in the pre-industrial past(Edvinsson, 2009: 2). For example, the worth of money is relatively stable andcontrolled in the western world today and money can thus be trusted. This wasnot the case in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sweden where monetary politicscould be rather incomprehensible from a modern point of view and coinage subjectto cycles of inflation and deflation that are generally unknown in the modernworld. This volatility must also have affected people’s perceptions of and relation-ships with money. The case of Swedish copper coinage illustrates these issues andenables them to be pursued in more detail.

Copper and copper coinage in post-medieval Sweden

Copper, iron, and forest products formed the backbone of Sweden’s economy inthe early modern period. Sweden was the leading producer of copper in Europe inthe seventeenth century when demand for the metal was high and other Europeansources in decline. The great mine at Falun, for example, in south-central Sweden,produced two-thirds of all European copper, with an average output of more than2000 tons of copper each year during its peak production period in the mid-seventeenth century (Heckscher, 1954: 175–176). Domestic metal production wasa major interest of the state for economic and ideological reasons, and resulted inthe founding of the Board of Mines in 1637 and something of a mining fever in thekingdom (e.g. Lappalainen, 2007). The effects of that fever reached the northernperiphery of Sweden, where mines and forges were established in the seventeenthcentury, although ultimately only one of the forges (Konganen) proved to be asuccess, and only for a short time (Awebro, 1993: 361; Hyotyniemi, 1978: 206;Lappalainen, 2007: 87–89).

The Swedish domination of European copper production in the seventeenthcentury was not without problems. Because the country needed the tax revenuefrom domestic metal production, the Swedish Crown maintained a high level ofoutput, but worried about the effect of overproduction on the price of copper ininternational markets. To solve this dilemma, the Crown decided to mint excesscopper into coins, with the aim of withholding copper from international marketswhile increasing the amount of cash in the kingdom (Lappalainen, 2007: 86–96;Tingstom, 1984: 24–25). Copper coins were introduced in 1624, but it soon becameclear that the Crown’s plan had failed. Monetary transactions had increased, butcoins flowed out of the country to be re-melted, and thus continued to affect theprice of copper, which in turn resulted in dramatic fluctuations in the value of




copper coins for the next hundred years (Lappalainen, 2007: 86–96; Tingstrom,1972: 12, 1984: 24–25; Wolontis, 1936).

The Swedish monetary system in the early modern period was complex and ratherconfusing from today’s point of view. The system dated back to the early secondmillennium and was based on the mark (c.210 g) of silver (Tingstrom, 1972: 7–9).The value of coins in domestic circulation had been bound to the value of silversince the Middle Ages, but the Swedish Crown introduced a dual standard withthe introduction of copper coinage: copper coins and later copper plate money(see further Tingstrom, 1984) were bound to the value of copper. At first, however,the new copper standard (henceforth KM, for kopparmynt) was also bound to thevalue of silver and silver coinage (henceforth SM, for silfermynt) in a fixedratio which assumed a stable relationship between the relative values of the twometals.

The price of copper plunged by 50 per cent within a few years after the intro-duction of copper coinage. This forced the Swedish Crown to discontinue theminting of copper coins and to invalidate their nominal value in 1629, and againin 1631. Sweden introduced an actual dual standard in 1633 that completely sepa-rated the copper standard from the value of silver. The separation of the twostandards did not improve the situation, however, and Sweden was forced to intro-duce the first nominal-value coin in the 1665 coinage reform. The 1/6 ore SM coinintroduced in 1666 was a copper coin but bound to the silver standard. After the1665 reform, then, the metal of which coins were made of and the metal to whichtheir value was bound were not necessarily the same. For example, the 1 ore KMcopper coin and the 1 ore SM copper coin from the mid-eighteenth century lookvery similar, but the latter was around four times more valuable than the formerbecause its value was based on the current value of silver.

In the years following the 1665 coinage reform, the value of KM-based coinagecontinued to fluctuate with the price of copper, and occasional high inflation, untilthe early eighteenth century when the situation finally stabilized; all the coin typesthat were minted in 1717 were in use until the coinage reform in 1776, when bothKM and SM standards were discontinued and Swedish coinage was bound to thevalue of new riksdaler. Yet despite the abolishment of the pre-1776 system, oldcoins of small nominal value remained in circulation until the early nineteenthcentury (Jonsson, 2005: 20; Lagerqvist and Nathorst-Boos, 1999: 11;Lappalainen, 2007: 92–96; Nurmi, 2011: 120–121; Tingstrom, 1972: 11–16;Wolontis, 1936). Whereas the value of copper and copper coins fluctuated inearly modern Sweden, the value of silver was more stable (Nurmi, 2011: 98). Thevalue of Swedish silver coins did, however, vary a little in the late seventeenthcentury when inflation peaked at 800 per cent (Jonsson, 2005: 18).

The minting of copper coins in Sweden was episodic and at best highly erratic,especially in the seventeenth century, when huge amounts of copper were releasedin brief pulses, followed by long periods of time when no coins were issued. Asimilar situation existed in Georgian England, on the brink of industrialization.Between 1754 and 1797, copper coins were only issued in 1770–1775, leading to an

Herva et al. 293



epidemic of counterfeiting and the introduction of copper tokens to pay workers bysome industrialists (Boon, 1974: 95).

In Sweden, coins sometimes only remained in circulation as official money for afew years, as was the case with the earliest types of copper coins (Jonsson, 2005: 19;Kivisto, 2003: 77), whereas silver coins and eighteenth-century coin types could be inuse for decades. Minting records may be used to provide an estimate of the differentquantities and types of coins that were minted at different times (see Tingstrom,1972) (Table 1). Although obviously subject to various biases, this allows a roughcomparison to be made between the composition of archaeological coin assemblagesand estimates of the possible total numbers of coins in circulation.

Copper coin assemblages from early modern sites innorthern Finland

Copper coins are common finds at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sites innorthern Finland, which at that time was a peripheral region of the Swedishrealm. In this section we provide a brief overview of coin assemblages from differ-ent types of sites, including two urban sites, three rural sites, and a church(Figure 1). Even a fairly general treatment and comparison of these assemblagesreveals some intriguing patterns (for a fuller discussion and presentation of thematerial, see Nurmi, 2011: 68–69, 117–126; Nurmi et al., 2009).

We begin with the small town of Tornio which is located on the northernmostGulf of Bothnia. When King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden founded Tornio in 1621, itwas the northernmost town in Europe and was licensed to control trade over a

Table 1. The most commonly minted early modern Swedish copper coins.

Monarch Gustav II Adolf Christina Carl XI Carl XII

Ulrika Eleonora &

Fredrik I

Nominal value 2 – 1/4 ore KM* ¼ ore KM 1/6 ore SM** 1 daler SM 1 ore KM and SM

Period of minting 1624–1631 1633–1654 1666–1686 1715–1719 1719–1744

Peak of minting 1628–1629 1634–1637 1666 1717–1718 1719–1721

Total minting

(millions)

150 128 108 42*** 80***

Peak period

minting

(millions)

– 96 35 35*** 36***

Minted

peak/total

57%**** 75% 32% 80% 45%

Notes: KM and SM refer to copper and silver standards, respectively, and do not necessarily indicate the actual

material used for coins, as explained in the main text. *KM¼ copper standard; **SM¼ silver standard;

***Over 30 million 1 daler (SM) coins were re-minted into 1 ore (KM) coins in 1719–1721 (Tingstrom,

1972: 300). ****The number of minted coins not available, ratio calculated from the value of annual total

coinage.




huge area in Lapland, in the uppermost reaches of Fennoscandia. Tornio pros-pered in the second half of the seventeenth century, but was devastated by Russianforces during the Great Northern War (1700–1721), only to rise again and flourishafter the War, in the mid–late eighteenth century. Excavations in Tornio haverecovered c.200 coins, the majority of which derive from one particular open-area excavation.

Copper coins of small denomination dominate the assemblage and over half ofthese coins (107 pieces) are of a single type, 1/4 ore KM copper coins minted duringthe reign of Queen Christina (1633–1654). Three other coin types appear in somenumbers, whereas the rest of the assemblage consists primarily of single examplesof other coin types (Table 2). It is clear that some coin types are over- or under-represented when compared to the possible number of coins which had been mintedand were in circulation (Table 1). For example, silver coins are very rare finds incomparison to copper coins, with a total of only 16 silver coins recovered byexcavations in Tornio. The same trend is evident in other studied contexts. Inaddition, seventeenth-century coins are much more common than eighteenth-century coins. It is worth noting in passing that the silver coins from Tornio areoften somewhat older than the archaeological contexts in which they are found,and in several cases pre-date the founding of the town and the introduction ofcopper money by decades. This would seem to indicate that silver coins remained inuse, either in circulation or else more passively as a form of stored wealth in safekeeping, for long periods of time. A comparison may be made between the silverfinds in Tornio and the silver denarii from the Roman republic, which are com-monly found in contexts from Roman Britain dating up to AD 80, some 200 yearsafter the coins had been minted (Reece, 1988: 42).

The key observation, however, is that some types of coins appear to have beenlost or discarded far more than others, and neither face value nor differences in thephysical size of coins explains the observed patterns; while copper coins sometimesended up in archaeological contexts in large quantities, smaller silver coins of thesame value did not. It is worth noting here that the early modern Swedish coppercoins which we refer to in this article were much larger in size than the thin and tinysilver coins of the same nominal value. On this basis, silver coins would presumablyhave been more easily lost than copper coins, but instead they seem to have beenmore readily retained (Nurmi et al., 2009).

An examination of coin finds from the town of Oulu, which is located some100 km southeast of Tornio and was founded in 1605, shows that the coin assem-blage is also dominated by seventeenth-century coins (Table 2). The coin finds fromrural sites show a different pattern, however, and differ from the urban assemblagesof Tornio and Oulu in two general ways.

First, coin finds are much fewer at rural than urban sites and these differencescannot be reduced to simple economic explanations, such as the function or statusof the studied sites, as discussed below. To begin with, a majority of the studiedcontexts of coin finds in both rural and urban settings in the present study areassociated with domestic residences. The argument could be made that townsfolk

Herva et al. 295



Table 2. Coin finds from the studied sites.

Coin type OS KK YK HL TO OU Total

Medieval 13 – 1 28 2 – 44

Gustav Vasa – – 2 3 – – 5

Erik XIV – – 1 – – – 1

Johan III 3 – 6 29 2 5 45

Carl IX – – – 2 4 2 8

Gustav II Adolf ‘klipping’ – – 1 2 9 3 15

Gustav II Adolf copper ore 1 – 1 4 16 5 27

Gustav II Adolf silver ore – 1 1 3 1 2 8

Christina 1/4 ore – 3 2 53 101 36 195

Christina copper ore – – – – 1 3 4

Christina silver ore – – – 2 1 – 3

Carl X 1/4 ore 1 – – – 1 – 2

Carl X copper ore – – – 1 – – 1

Carl XI 1/6 ore 8 4 1 140 28 9 190

Carl XI copper ore – – – – 1 – 1

Carl XI silver ore – – – 8 4 1 13

Carl XI silver mark – – – – – 1 1

Carl XII 1/6 ore – – – 9 – – 9

Carl XII ‘emergency money’ – – – 5 – 1 6

Carl XII silver ore 1 – – 9 – – 10

Ulrika Eleonora ore – 1 – – – – 1

Fredrik I ore (KM) 18 15 14 69 5 17 138

Fredrik I ore (SM) – – – – 3 – 3

Fredrik I silver money – 1 1 4 – – 6

Adolf Fredrik ore (KM) 2 1 2 1 – 1 7

Adolf Fredrik ore (SM) 1 – 1 – 1 – 3

Gustav III ore 1 – – 3 – – 4

19th century shilling 5 – 4 11 1 1 22

Penny 1 – 7 11 4 7 30

Kopek 1 – 1 9 1 – 12

German pfennig – – – – 1 – 1

Unidentified 1 – – 3 – 5 9

Total 57 26 46 399 188 99 815

Notes: OS¼Oravaisensaari, KK¼Kainuunkyla, YK¼Ylikyla, HL¼Hailuoto, TO¼Tornio (coins from the

2002 excavations at the Rakennustuote and Ryhmakoti lots), OU¼Oulu (coins from the excavations at

the NMKY [YMCA] lot).




in early modern Sweden were more actively involved in trade and monetarytransactions than their country cousins, and that this might once again explainthe concentration of coin finds in urban contexts. While this assumption mayhold true to some extent, there is no reason to lean too heavily on this explanation.The infrastructure and functions of buildings in early modern small towns in north-ern Sweden were relatively non-differentiated and there were, for instance,no shops. Trade took place in merchants’ homes, in an open market area, oron the streets lining the harbour, where purpose-built warehouses were located.While merchants lived in nominally urban settings, their ways of life in such per-ipheral towns as Tornio reflected and were in many ways embedded in rural cul-ture. Second, eighteenth-century coins are, again in contrast to the urban sites,more commonly found on the rural sites than seventeenth-century coins (Nurmiet al., 2009).

The coin finds from the old church at Hailuoto show a different patterning.Excavations at the site produced a large assemblage of coins (399 finds) datingfrom the fifteenth to the twentieth century (Paavola, 1988, 1991, 1995). Some cointypes clearly dominate the assemblage, but the distribution of different coin types ismore balanced – or closer to an expected ‘random’ patterning – than at the othersites discussed above. For instance, the Hailuoto assemblage includes types of coinswhich were minted in large quantities but are rarely found in archaeological con-texts. Once again, the composition of the assemblage cannot be explained by acci-dental loss, the small denomination, or physical size.

The coins found in the church are commonly understood to be casual losses, andare thought to have slipped through the gaps between the loosely fitting planks ofthe church floor. The Hailuoto assemblage does not really support this assumption,however. To begin with, small thin silver coins should have dropped through thefloor more easily than large thick copper coins. Furthermore, although the distri-bution of coin types in the church context is more even than in residential contexts,there are reasons to believe that some coins at least were intentionally depositedwith the dead buried under the floor and/or dropped between the planks as ‘offer-ings’ to the deceased (Nurmi, 2011: 125; Paulaharju, 1914: 107; see also Grinder-Hansen, 1988: 115–126).

The selection of ‘coins for the ancestral dead’ was, however, undertaken withdue care for the living, giving some credence to the functionalist view that ‘the coinmaterial available for study from site finds will represent what the original ownerscould best afford to lose’ (Casey, 1974: 38). Coins that had lost their value or hadbeen discontinued appear to be more common in the Hailuoto assemblage, sug-gesting that otherwise ‘useless’ coins were still thought to be suitable for depositionand to serve as a currency in the afterlife (Nurmi, 2011: 124–126). A similar inter-pretation has been put forward to explain the inclusion of copper coins in medievalburials in Italy, where the low-value of the coins was deemed to make them ‘good’(inasmuch as they were available to all) and therefore suitable for the afterlife,where the dead had eschewed worldly goods and material wealth (Travaini,2004: 172).

Herva et al. 297



The above observations demonstrate, or at least imply, a number of things. Themost obvious point is that there are clear differences between the coin finds fromdifferent (types of) sites. It is possible in principle, of course, that the observeddifferences between the studied coin assemblages reflect non-homogenous patternsof the circulation of coins within the area of study. While it is impossible to knowthe impact of this kind of factor on the studied coin assemblages with any certainty,there are also no reasons to believe, as far as we are aware, that the differencesbetween the assemblages could be reduced to differential availability of types ofcoinage. The possibility must therefore be seriously considered that peopleengaged, for whatever specific reasons, with coinage differently in different placesand situations. The composition of the assemblages would certainly appear tosuggest that coins did not end up in archaeological contexts only through therandom process of occasional loss.

It seems, therefore, that certain coin types were intentionally discarded. Themost commonly found coins, such as 1/4 ore KM coins of Queen Christina and1/6 ore SM coins of King Carl XI, are also those that lost much of their value in ashort time. Some intriguing questions about archaeological coin finds remain, how-ever, even if it is accepted that coins were intentionally discarded rather thanaccidentally lost. A closer look at archaeological contexts is needed before explor-ing those questions further. In our next example, a coin assemblage from Tornio isinvestigated to find out if contextual information can provide further insights intohow coins ended up in archaeological deposits. For example, is it possible to tellintentionally discarded coins apart from those that became deposited through someother mechanism? The results of this contextual approach are difficult to interpret,but they nonetheless offer some clues as to the multiple meanings attached to coinsand coinage.

Coins and contexts: A closer look at coin finds from Tornio

The coin finds discussed in this section derive from a large-scale excavation con-ducted in Tornio in 2002. Two large trenches were cut through a number of earlymodern house plots. The remains of several wooden buildings were investigated,along with associated yard layers. The finds recovered by these interventions aretypical of European early modern urban sites and include animal bones, variousclasses of imported pottery, clay pipes, bottle and vessel glass, and a variety ofsmall finds. While there are differences between the finds from different (types of)contexts, the distribution of the archaeological material may be characterized by itshomogeneity. Very few contexts stand out as particularly rich or otherwise ‘special’in terms of the finds that they yielded.

A total of 187 coins, predominantly of copper, were found. Almost 85 per centof the coins were found in contexts associated more or less directly with buildingremains. The number of coins found in association with the remains of individualbuildings varies from three to as many as 59. The majority of the individual strati-graphic units which contained coins (48 units out of 62) produced only one to three




coins and 12 units contained four to 10 coins. Two units stand out as particularlycoin rich. The richest unit, with 25 coins, was a layer directly below the woodenfloor of a house, possibly that of a tobacco merchant. Of these coins, 22 were 1/4ore KM copper coins minted during the reign of Queen Christina, and the otherthree included one 1 ore KM copper coin, one 1 ore silver coin (dating from 1585),and a rare token of the Kongas forge. The distribution of coin types in this assem-blage certainly appears a little odd, but there is otherwise nothing special to thecontext of the coins. The 14 coins in the second richest context, in turn, wereclustered in a layer associated with a fireplace, but the depositional history ofthe coins is unclear. The assemblage includes eight 1/4 ore KM copper coins,one 1 ore SM silver coin, and the rest are of different types.

In general, there do not seem to be any obvious differences between the con-textual associations of different types of coins, but then again few coin typesare common enough to allow any statistically meaningful form of comparison.The 1/4 ore KM copper coins which dominate the entire coin assemblage, forexample, were found in all types of contexts, along with other types of coins.Silver coins were found in the same contexts as copper coins, and coins alsoappeared in various combinations in different stratigraphic contexts. That said,some coin finds do appear to show a clear depositional trend. In five cases coinswere associated with building remains so as to suggest possible intentional depos-ition linked to the laying of foundations. These possible foundation depositsincluded both copper and silver coins of various types, and comprised betweenone and three coins.

One case merits a brief comment because it involved two silver coins which hadbeen minted over a century before the founding of Tornio – one in the 1490s andthe other around 1513 – the oldest coin finds from the town. The coins werecorroded together and were found in a shallow scoop or pit in sterile ground,under the layer of woodchips and splinters associated with the earliest buildingphase of the town. The pit was associated with building remains, and the coins andthe feature in which they were buried may therefore have been deposited as anintentionally placed votive offering. While the exact nature of this and the otherfour deposits is not entirely clear, the tradition of placing coins in the foundationsof buildings is well known and archaeologically attested (e.g. Hukantaival, 2006:60–62; Korhonen, 2009: 264–267; Merrifield, 1987: 49; see also below), and othertypes of ‘foundation deposits’ have also been identified in Tornio including ‘offer-ings’ of iron, ceramics, and even bear claws (Herva, 2010; Herva and Ylimaunu,2009; Nurmi, 2011: 146–151).

In addition to these five examples of buried coins, there are other finds thatmight have been used and/or deposited in special circumstances. Two coins havebeen pierced, apparently to be used as pendants. The first is a counting token fromNuremberg and dates from the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Thesecond is a silver coin, which derives from one of the possible foundation depositsdescribed above, but is also pierced. The practice of piercing coins is well known inall periods of coin use, and while the two examples in the Tornio assemblage are

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isolated examples, they nonetheless serve to remind us that special meanings wereattached to (certain) coins.

The use of perforated medieval coins as amulets or charms, serving as apotro-paic badges to ward off evil using the sacred imagery of the cross or the sacralimage of the king’s head, has been reviewed by Hall (2012: 76–77). The find of apierced token in Tornio from the pilgrim destination of Nuremburg may well beexplained as a memory token, or talisman. The broader point is that our modernworld is saturated with images, and this can lead us to overlook the power ofapparently simple images, such as those stamped on coins, in less visually saturatedtimes.

Coins, metals and recycling

The presence of coins in early modern contexts in Tornio and other sites has beentaken as a given in Finnish and Swedish archaeology. On a closer inspection,however, it is not self-evident why coins should be found in the first place. Therecan be little doubt that coins were sometimes lost or became otherwise uninten-tionally deposited. But if coins were also intentionally discarded, as suggestedabove, why were they not recycled? On the basis of the Tornio material, at least,recycling of coins could be expected for a number of reasons.

Traces of repair and reuse are common on everyday artefacts especially fromseventeenth-century contexts in Tornio (Herva and Nurmi, 2009; Nurmi, 2011;Salo, 2007). Such traces can be observed in different classes of finds, includingpottery, clay pipes, and glass. To take but a few examples, potsherds have beenworked into spindle whorls and pieces of window glass into counters or gamingpieces. Metal was also reused although the evidence is of course mainly indirect.Iron objects are abundant but dominated by nails. Knives are also commonlyfound, whereas the rest of the iron assemblage consists of, for instance, occasionalkeys and tools or their fragments.

The scarcity of other (reusable) metals in the assemblage is conspicuous, how-ever, and lead is a particularly illustrative example. Lead finds from Tornio are fewin number, although the metal must have been commonly used especially as camesfor holding glass in place within window frames. The few documented scrap piecesof lead weigh only about 100 g in total, which is enough for framing only one-fourth of a single average-sized seventeenth-century Swedish window. The totalweight of window glass, on the other hand, is around 12 kg, which equals around30 average-sized windows (Nurmi, 2011: 145). This disparity between lead andwindow glass quite clearly indicates that lead cames were systematically collectedand reused.

As to copper, copper finds other than coins comprise small artefacts, such asthimbles, pins, and small pieces of cutting waste. The coin finds, which weighc.1.6 kg in total, make up about 75 per cent of the entire copper assemblage.Copper artefacts have certainly been more common than the copper finds suggest,which can again be taken to suggest recycling of the metal. It is known that




small-scale metalworking was practised in the town (Ylimaunu, 2007: 60–68; seealso Englund, 2002: 221–223). But while copper coins appear to have been inten-tionally discarded, they do not seem to have been melted down, even though thecoins were made from perfectly good copper and there are good reasons, as seenabove, to believe that recycling of metals and other materials was otherwise acommon practice. There is no simple explanation to the seeming reluctance torecycle coins, other than the fact that the coins were the property of the Crown,but the question merits some further discussion which will also explore more gen-eral attitudes to coinage and money.

The power of coins

Economic factors are obviously important for appreciating the role and signifi-cance of money in the northern periphery of early modern Sweden, but certainbroader cosmological concepts are also relevant to understanding how peopleperceived and engaged with coins. This ‘high level’ contextualization does not dir-ectly explain particular features observed in archaeological contexts but it helps tolook at early modern coins from a different perspective, which in turn generatessome insights on ‘belief-related’ uses of money and the apparent reluctance torecycle coins.

The world and its workings were understood very differently in the early modernperiod from today. An important starting point here is that modern distinctionsbetween the natural and the supernatural, or the practical and the symbolic/ritual,are largely inapplicable to the early modern and especially pre-Enlightenment world(Bruck, 1999; Henry, 2008). This is perhaps particularly clear in the northern per-iphery of Europe where a variety of ‘supernatural’ beings from earthlings and giantsto manifold spirits of natural and cultural places were not only believed to exist,but, indeed, were perceived and thought to actively engage with humans within thecontexts of everyday life. Likewise, all kinds of things from soils and trees to stonecairns and common artefacts were considered to possess special powers that were,nonetheless, an entirely natural aspect of material things. All things in that worldwere also connected through correspondences, resemblances, and other magicalnetworks of influence and causality (Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009 with references).

A key point here is that forms of magical thinking and practice cut acrosseveryday life and were embedded in the local mode of being in the world.Elements of broadly animistic-shamanistic concepts of and relationships with theworld persisted in the north centuries after the region had become nominallyChristianized. They persisted especially in rural culture well into modern times,but were arguably of significance at least in early modern Tornio and other newtowns that the Crown of Sweden founded in the previously non-urban northernparts of the kingdom in the seventeenth century (Herva, 2010; Herva and Salmi,2010; Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009).

Coins could have been imbued with meaning and special powers for variousreasons. Folklore indicates that coins and pieces of metal were given as offerings to

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spirits (Korhonen, 2009: 264). The charms associated with magical uses of moneydo sometimes specify the material of the coins used (e.g. SKVR I4: 2116; X2: 3204;X2: 4591),1 but it remains unclear whether or not the material itself was actuallyconsidered of particular importance. The special properties attributed to iron inFinnish folk culture are well known (e.g. Oukka, 1976: 65, 68, 70–71; Sarmela,1994: 131–133), and iron objects appear in foundation deposits and related specialcontexts in Tornio and elsewhere (e.g. Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009; Hukantaival,2006: 87–89, 93–94; Tuppi, 2009). Other metals and their properties are sometimesreferred to in folklore but do not feature in a similarly important manner as iron.Silver has long-standing associations with belief-related practices in the north,whereas the possible special properties of copper in the historical period aremore obscure.

The representational or symbolic nature of money provides another angle on themeanings of coins. Early modern Swedish coins were minted by the Crown and hadsymbols of regents and the state on them. Coins are sometimes referred to as the‘king’s money’ or the ‘emperor’s money’ in charms associated with magical uses ofcoins (e.g. SKVR VII4 loitsut: 3138; IX4: 1613), which might indicate an attempt todraw the authority of regents through money associated with them. Indeed, onerecorded charm specifically mentions that a coin deposited in a corner of a housewas to bring peace to the household ‘on behalf of the king’ (SKVR X2: 5016).There is also evidence that coins minted by three different kings have intentionallybeen chosen to be deposited in buildings, and such deposits have been identified inthe context of residential buildings and also a church (e.g. Halinen, 2002: 32–33;Hukantaival, 2006: 61; Sarvas, 1982).

In early modern Europe, coins could symbolically or ceremonially represent theking in certain situations (Muir, 2005: 272), but there may also have been a deeperconnection between the two in the form of image magic. Coins in this view wouldhave ‘abducted’ something of the power of the king and ‘charged’ coins with agencyand special potency (cf. Gell, 1998). This kind of connection was arguably made insome medieval European contexts (Maguire, 1997; Theuws, 2004), and a similargeneral principle of magical associations, as described above, was at the heart offolk cosmology in the pre-industrial northern periphery of Sweden. To take but oneexample, ecclesiastical artefacts were sometimes stolen and used for magical pur-poses in early modern Finland (Eilola, 2003: 60–61), supposedly because they weretaken to embody the power of God or the church. It seems possible that coins, too,were considered to possess inherent power, which more or less passively discouragedthe destruction of money (in addition to the fact that they were Crown property) andmade coins ‘naturally’ suitable for uses in magical practices.

Money, magic, and rationality: Discussion and archaeologicalimplications

While attitudes to and understanding of money have undoubtedly changed in thepost-medieval centuries, Finnish folklore suggests that coins continued to be used




in various magical practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Money was used to claim land from spirits before building a house (Korhonen,2009: 264–265; SKVR IX4: 1572) and as a payment to spirits when taking super-naturally potent soil from the graveyard (SKVR I4: 27–28). Coins were also used insummoning water spirits or protecting cattle from them (SKVR I4: 36, I4: 1447), aswell as releasing cattle from the supernatural ‘binding of the forest’ (SKVR VI2:5403). Animals could supposedly be protected by hiding coins (or various otherthings) under or in animal sheds (SKVR I4: 1614, I4: 1617). Money was alsoemployed in healing practices (SKVR I4: 735, VI2: 4492).

Although late in date and rather anecdotal in character, folklore can help notonly to interpret archaeological coin finds but also to cast light on how peopleperceived money in general. Folk beliefs have been employed in the interpretationof apparently intentional deposits of coins in, for example, the foundations ofbuildings (e.g. Halinen, 2002: 32–33; Hukantaival, 2006: 60–62). It is clear thatparticular folk beliefs recorded in the nineteenth century cannot be directly pro-jected on specific early modern finds, but general-level continuities in thought andpractice are in evidence across centuries, which in principle makes it feasible todraw insight from folklore for the purposes of archaeological interpretation.

But while folklore can be useful for understanding various aspects of life in theearly modern past, the common tendency to draw from and consider folk beliefsonly in the context of odd or special finds, such as coins deposited in buildings, isproblematic in potentially trivializing the influence of folk beliefs on broader pat-terns of everyday life. Rather than simply a source of ‘explanations’ for occasionalspecial finds, folk beliefs can be understood as reflecting broader ideas about thesurrounding world and its workings (Herva, 2010; Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009).

This leads us to the possible broader implications of the use of coins for magicalpurposes at the rather late date when folk beliefs about coins were recorded. Itwould be easy to dismiss magical uses of coins, particularly at the time whenfolklore was recorded, as mere lingering superstitions from earlier times, butthey can also be interpreted as indicating continuing ‘animistic’ relationshipswith the surrounding world. Rather than de-personalizing the traditional animistickind of relationships with the environment, money became incorporated in thetraditional mode of negotiating relationships with spirits associated with variousconstituents of the natural and cultural environments. Animistic relationships, inother words, became monetized, but nonetheless persisted as a practice at least inmore peripheral rural areas until the comparatively recent past.

While money is readily associated with rational thinking in contemporary west-ern society, the use of money to mediate relationships with ‘spiritual’ beings orforces makes sense in the context of the pre-industrial northern world, both at thetime when copper money was introduced and when folklore on magical uses ofcoins was recorded. In addition, the uncontrolled fluctuations in the value ofcopper coins in the seventeenth century may well have promoted ‘magical’ attitudesto coinage as people attributed agency to the inanimate objects (i.e. coins) whichdid not do what the people controlling them wanted them to do (cf. Barrett and

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Johnson, 2003; also Gell, 1998: 18–19). Conversely, the transformation of moneyinto a distinctively symbolic form of material culture – a matter of trust, and indeedof belief – with the separation of the value of money from the material of moneymay have given rise to the idea that money was by nature a suitable medium fordealing with the ‘spiritual’ world.

Conclusions

Recent research on money in various historical and cultural contexts has made itclear that modern western ideas of money are not universal; rather, the meanings ofmoney and coinage vary within and between cultures (Hall, 2012; Kemmers andMyrberg, 2011; Wynne-Jones and Fleisher, 2012). This article has discussed arch-aeological coin assemblages from several sites in northern Finland, with a particu-lar emphasis on the town of Tornio, founded in the early seventeenth century. Itwas shown that the composition of excavated coin assemblages does not appearrandom, and that there are reasons to believe that some (types of) coins wereintentionally discarded.

The differences between the discussed coin assemblages also indicate that coinscame to be deposited in different ways in different places, which in turn suggeststhat people engaged with money differently in different situations. We have sug-gested that whereas it is well known from archaeology and folklore that coins wereused for belief-related purposes in the post-medieval period, the wider implicationsof such practices have not been adequately explored. We have argued that, ratherthan showing a deviation from some ‘normal’ use of coinage, belief-related andother non-monetary uses of coins may in fact provide clues as to how coinage wasperceived and understood more generally in the northern periphery of post-med-ieval Europe.

Note

1. SKVR ¼ Suomen kansan vanhat runot [Traditional poetry of the Finnish people] data-base: http://dbgw.finlit.fi/skvr (accessed February 2011).

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Author Biographies

Vesa-Pekka Herva is assistant professor in cultural heritage studies at theUniversity of Helsinki, Finland. He has studied various aspects of material cultureand human-environment relations in post-medieval Europe, with a focus on thenorthern Baltic Sea region.




Risto Nurmi has recently gained a PhD in archaeology from the University of Oulu,Finland. His research interests focus on artefact studies and social development innorthern Europe during the medieval and early modern period.

James Symonds is presently York Archaeological Trust Fellow at the University ofYork, UK. He specializes in modern world historical archaeology and his researchhas explored aspects of capitalism, improvement, colonialism, diaspora and ethni-city in the recent past.

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Engaging with money in a northern periphery of early modern Europe

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