Was the Inca Economy Based on “Protomoney”? Or, Why Accounting Systems Should Not Be Conflated With Concepts of Exchange Value

Alf Hornborg

Economic Anthropology, 2026, vol. 13, issue 1

Abstract: The khipu knotted string records in the ancient Andes were accounting systems, but they did not indicate any concepts of commensurability or exchange value. They were not incipient money; instead, monetized commerce appears to have predated the economic organization of the Inca society. The article begins by tracing the emergence of coinage in the Aegean area around 600 bce and reflecting on the subsequent role of money fetishism in Eurasian economic history. As David Graeber has argued, the transformation of accounting systems into inherently valuable artifacts in the Axial Age (800–200 bce) appears to have fundamentally transformed social relations and cosmologies. The dramatic ramifications of coined money are highlighted by the profound differences between premodern civilizations in Eurasia and the Andes. The absence of money in the Inca Empire was a result of an elite power strategy but had the inadvertent effect of promoting local community autonomy. Accounts of the Inca economy that gravitate toward a neoformalist approach are rejected as distortions of its cultural specificity. The article argues for an acknowledgment of the momentous significance of physical money tokens. It discusses the cultural processes by which money can be transformed from an accounting system to an indexical sign attributed with intrinsic exchange value.

Date: 2026
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