alt Hacker NewsGetting Started with Celtic Coins – Crude and Barbarous, or Just Different?
Comments
There is a parallel to this Celtic imitations that is found primarily in modern Ukraine[1], attribute to Cherniakhov culture[2]. The theory for them is that once the trade with Roman Empire ceased, the locals needed bigger supply of coins and started minting their own.
There is a curious thing with this "branch", I'm not sure if it's the same in the Celtic one. The last time I talked to people researching this, I was told that: a. The findings are mostly unique, it's hard to find two copies of the same coin. Sometimes obverse of one coin could be found on another, but reverses don't match. b. These coins are not cast, they are minted through "hammering", which requires a stamp. However, not a single stamp has been found so far. A much easier way to make currency out of existing one would be to just slap existing coin into some clay, make a casting mold and just pour molten metal into it.
This of course is more of a curiosity/rumor level, I don't have any qualifications to back it up.
[1]: http://barbarous-imitations.narod.ru/ (apologize for a .ru website, but it's the best catalogue to my knowledge.)
The Celts were far from primitive barbarians. In fact, the Romans adopted many technological innovations from the (Celtic) La Tène material culture in what is now Switzerland. This includes the gladius and spatha swords, the Montefortino helmet, the lorica hamata chainmail armor and the oval scutum shield. In fact, most of the armament of a Roman soldier was based on La Tène originals or Celto-Iberic ones.
Probably worth pointing out that the link is to a sub-chapter of a much larger article, and a later sub-chapter at that. The full piece starts here: https://collectingancientcoins.co.uk/getting-started-with-ce...
Watch for Chinese coin fakers. They have a huge presence on Ebay with coins that look good, but some have huge errors, wrong years, wrong mint marks. They also do it with other old coins. They are into the $10-$50 coins. The Tungsten coins that are all over China now are so valuable that few buy on Ebay. Sonic chirp meters detect them. On youtube = fake gold china will give hits. One good method is a scintillation detector. Few old gold coins or Roman/Celtic coins have any nuclear isotopes from WW2 or the atmospheric test era. Geiger counters are usually not good enough. The modern fakes are easily spotted with the correct scintillation detector, which has a fair sized scintillation stone. The low cost ali-express radiation detectors are a lot less sensitive
Mind blowing. I have an abstract coin from Gujarat India, c 800 AD, showing a mushroom. Mysterious.
Honestly it doesn't look like the Celts were "practitioners of abstract art" and more like they just lacked the concept of mass producing from an original. "When they tell me make copies of silver staters, I pulls one out of my pocket and I makes the copies." Humans instinctively recognize whether a face is well-smithed and genuine, but you would have to train everyone what these designs were supposed to represent and how to appreciate that.
It just seems like they let things degenerate because they weren't trying to do art but just do things the way they'd always done them, with no controls on data degradation between generations.
This is something I've spent a fair amount of time studying (abstraction of language, writing, culture) and often material changes such as this come from changes in tooling and process. An example: A small change comes about due to pencil -> pen, and then very abruptly from pen->keyboard.
You start seeing it in everything the more you learn.
Even if you don't read the article, and even if (like me) you don't particularly care about coin collecting, you should still scroll to the bottom for the cool photos showing how the designs became more abstract over time.