The story on stone money is that about five hundred years ago some Yapese canoes reached the rock islands of Palau. They were impressed by the crystalline rock of these islands and carved out a disk of it to take home. So that they could carry the disk, they put a hole in the middle so that a group of men could carry the disk threaded onto a log. To get the heavy stone home, they made a little bamboo raft to float it on.

Back in Yap, the money served as a trophy of the men’s adventure. The harder your trip was (storms, sinkings, drownings, attacks by Palau warriors), the more that given piece of stone money was worth — it had more of a story associated with it. What could you “buy” with stone money? Not goods or a house — for those you needed a different kind of money, shell money. But you could give a disk of stone money to a family as the bride-price for taking a daughter as your wife. Or, as my dive guide Gordon explained to me, “If your brother Embry got drunk and made a lot of noise in the village and some family was mad at him, you could give them a piece of stone money to make it alright.” You wouldn’t necessarily have to move the stone money anyplace, you’d just reassign ownership. Often a village’s stone money would be lined up near the central dancing area to make what they call a stone money bank.

It’s scattered all over Yap, you see it in every village, and pieces of it are near most public places as well.

Later when we were on the dive boat in Palau, passing through the rock islands, I was talking with our Palauan boat pilot and I said something like, “The Yapese used to come here and tear off a piece from these islands.” The pilot, high on betel-nut of course, laughed wildly, as if visualizing the folly of those rustic Yapese. [Not actually the same pilot as shown in this picture.] And the next day he returned to the joke, pointing out a natural bridge worn into the rock islands, saying, “That’s where they took away the stone money.”

In a way, taking photos is like taking stone money.

One of my blog-readers asked what kind of camera I used for these pictures. A pocket-sized SONY Cybershot DSC-T1. It has 5 Meg, which is more than enough, and becuase I carry it a lot more than I used to carry my Leica, I get a lot more pictures. The lens is tiny, but it’s okay that the lens is tiny since the “film” is a tiny CCD chip. Also its a Zeiss lens. The only downside with a camera this small is that it’s so lightweight that it tends to shake when you get down to low light long exposures. Would be nice if it has some kind of grabber so you could temporarlily mass-ballast it by fastening it to a handy rock. Just for kicks for the photo mavens, you can click here to see that last cool red,white, and blue stone money picture in larger format, about 2700 pixels across.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 at 7:55 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.