Iron currency bars are objects used by Iron Age people to exchange goods.
The bars were expensive objects, as it would take 25 man-days to produce 1 kg (2.2 lb) of a finished bar, usually shaped with a small socket at one end, and consume 100 kg (220 lb) of charcoal.[1]
Iron spits were used as money in Greece before silver currency. Sparta deliberately used iron currency to make amassing wealth unwieldy, and remained on an iron currency standard all through Greece's golden age.[2]
Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, mentions iron currency in Britain.[3]
"For money they use bronze or gold coins, or iron bars of fixed weights." — Julius Caesar, 54 BC[1]
Iron hoes circulated as money in India, Africa, and Indochina, and were the smallest monetary unit of the Bahnar people.
During the nineteenth century, iron bars circulated as money in the Congo. During the nineteenth century, iron hoes circulated in the remote areas of Sudan. The western Uganda Chiga used hoes as their unit of account without using of them as a medium of exchange or store of value. In Portuguese East Africa a hoe standard replaced a cattle standard, and some hoes circulated only as currency and were never used agriculturally. In the French Congo, iron bars, shovels, hoes, blades, and iron double bells played the role of currency. In mid-nineteenth-century Nigeria, a slave cost 40 iron hoes.
In 1824, 394 currency bars were found, 1.2m below the surface, at a re-used camp on Meon Hill,[4][5] Mickleton, Gloucestershire.[6][7]
In 1860, currency bars were discovered at Salmonsbury Camp, Bourton-on-the-Water.[8][9]
In 1942, Iron currency bars were found around Llyn Cerrig Bach and the surrounding peat bog in Wales.[10]