alt Hacker NewsHonestly 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.
> One final thing the Celts did that can give the impression of crudeness is that they sometimes created dies that were larger than the flans they used. This means that the full design would never appear on any one coin, and this can make it look like they just didn’t know what they were doing. However, the Celts produced the flans with very tightly controlled weights and alloy compositions, so the idea that they could do this but not get the dies the correct size is absurd.
The tooling was improving, becoming more detailed and complex over time. Nothing was staying the same over the generations. The coins changed in the midst of technological revolution.