Broken pieces of metal unearthed in many European countries have just been identified as a treasure trove of ancient coins of great value in the past and present.
According to Acient Origins, the research team from the University of Göttingen (Germany) and Sapienza University in Rome (Italy) collected 2,500 metal fragments from many Bronze Age excavation sites in Italy, Germany and Poland, located among of many great archaeological treasures. All date from around the 2nd century BC.
These pieces of broken “bottles” are actually valuable ancient coins – Photo: Nicola Ialongo / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
At first, people thought it was simply a few damaged or broken objects, but analysis results showed that they were broken intentionally. The authors created a statistical model and showed that these objects represent multiples of a standard weight: one object weighs one and a half times, twice as much, or three times as much as another object. That cannot be a coincidence.
The surprising conclusion: those “waste” piles were actually items cut up and precisely weighed to the desired size and weight, then put into circulation as the first coins. In other words, what archaeological teams found were ancient vaults that ancient people had carefully hidden, or respectfully buried with the dead.
Although Bronze Age Europeans were not the first to use pieces of metal as money, this was a very important discovery, a major milestone in the civilizational history of these countries, pushing trade to a new level. Before that, Mesopotamians used silver bars as money since the 3rd millennium BC.
According to Dr. Nicola Ialongo from the University of Göttingen, the use of metal pieces cut from these utensils as money could have begun around 1,300 BC, and this type of money is used in a very modern way, that is, functionally no different from today’s coins.
