8/19/2023 0 Comments Chinese coins bulkAnd it doesn’t necessarily mean that China did it first.” ![]() George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, says that while the discovery is impressive, “It doesn't change our basic understanding of when the first coins were produced. If such coins are found with evidence of fire damage, researchers can radiocarbon date them-but they won’t be sure “if that burning has anything to do with the time period during which the coin was used,” Maurer explains, or if the coins were instead burned in a haphazard fire.īut here, “you've got a foundry which is full of carbon residue associated with the production of the item itself,” Maurer says, which can prove how old the coins and mint actually are. Finding both coins and their molds is what allowed the researchers to radiocarbon date the mint, lending weight to their assertion that it’s the oldest known in the world.Ĭoins are typically discovered isolated or hoarded away from where they were made, stashed in the rafters of a house or buried in a hole in the ground, Maurer says, “completely divorced from any sort of context that you can definitively say was associated with the coins themselves.” The completeness of the discovery is what’s remarkable, says Maurer, who was not involved in the research. “But in this case, you’ve got the whole mint, and you’ve got the casts that were used.” ![]() Strong evidence, not proofĬoins are often found “bundled together and completely lacking any of the original context of their production or their use,” says Bill Maurer, a professor of anthropology at the University of California Irvine and director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion.
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