Read the following excerpt from an essay on ancient economic history:
In orthodox economic historiography, the emergence of money is traditionally conceptualized as a spontaneous market adaptation designed to circumvent the transaction costs inherent in bilateral barter. According to this metallist paradigm, precious metals achieved preeminence because their intrinsic durability, divisibility, and high value-to-bulk ratio made them ideal media of physical exchange. However, epigraphic analyses of third-millennium BCE Sumerian administrative cuneiform archives directly challenge this evolutionary narrative. These records indicate that silver functioned primarily as an abstract, centralized unit of account instituted by temple and palace bureaucracies to rationalize internal fiscal administration and standardize reciprocal obligations, rather than as circulating currency in decentralized markets. While agrarian obligations and institutional debts were rigorously denominated in fixed silver-shekel equivalences, actual settlements occurred predominantly in barley, wool, or labor services, with silver bullion rarely changing hands among ordinary producers. The administrative fixing of barley-to-silver price ratios was thus designed to stabilize institutional revenue extractions against agricultural volatility, rather than to facilitate fluid private bargaining.
Statement: In the context of the passage, the author notes that 'actual settlements occurred predominantly in barley, wool, or labor services, with silver bullion rarely changing hands among ordinary producers' primarily to concede a methodological limitation in using institutional cuneiform tablets to reconstruct private commercial practices.
Answer: Answer