alt Hacker News> 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.
You're quoting that part as persuasive? I was going to attack it as a wobbly argument, but I didn't want to be cruel, it falls over all by itself.
The article is full of special pleading for the Celts being capable of making good copies, but refraining from doing so because they didn't ever feel like it and were permanently swept up by the abstract muse.
> Instead, it’s thought that the dies were larger than the flans [blanks] so that part of the image always resided in the unseen spiritual world that the Celts worshiped so much.
How about they just weren't keen on thinking ahead? Then they make the dies first, and as an afterthought they make the blanks the correct weight. This would also explain how Apollo was mostly hair - start engraving hair, get carried away, now coin is full of hair, cram a face in the remaining space. But no, no, they were in superb control of every aspect of metalwork at all times, and anything that seems like a fuck-up was actually spirituality.
I can accept that part of the reason for abstract coins is that they weren't motivated to make accurate copies, but I think also they couldn't.