Money in a Bottle - NYTimes.com When I was working on my article on money for last weekend's "Who Made That?" issue, I called Harcourt Fuller to talk about the history of salt money in Africa. He wound up telling me how, when he was growing up in Jamaica in the 1980s, people in his neighborhood used empty Coke bottles as money. Fuller, a historian at Georgia State University, edited a book about money in Africa. After he told me about salt (in the kingdom of Mali, an ounce of salt was worth as much as an ounce of gold) and about glass beads on the Swahili Coast and about cattle and cloth money, Fuller mentioned the Coke bottles. "If you visited someone's house, they would have crates of empty bottles," he told me. As a kid, "you would have your own little stash of bottles." They could be redeemed for a few cents each, but people often used the empties themselves as a kind of currency. "You could actually spend it," Fuller said. You could exchange, say, six bottles for two slices of bread with some butter and a box of orange juice.