Yesterday I picked up an 1871 10 Centavo (it has a repunched 1/1 that's visible to the naked eye). The mintmark has me flummoxed though. The coin is in well circulated condition (probably an F12) and is tiny to boot, so I haven't been able to get any pictures that look better than a silver toned blur. The mintmark appears to be P_'S. I'm not having any luck finding that (or even D_S) in my limited catalogs. I found a promising link, but it didn't list any mints that seemed to fit: http://dewardt.net/dimebook/Mexico.pdf Does anyone have a list of mints and mintages from 1871 handy (if I keep finding 19th century silver, I'm going to have to break down and get a 19th century Krause book sooner or later ).
Perhaps it's San Luis Potosi (KM# 403.9). You can sign up for a free Numismaster account and use their "Find my coin" function to ID coins. They don't have images of everything, especially earlier stuff like this, but if you can input the correct info to describe the coin you can get a KM #. Also, I hope you'll post some pics of the coin when you can. I enjoy Mexican coins myself.
I thought it would be Potosi as well, but in 1871, it appears that Potosi was using a "Pi" mint mark. Were there pattern or transitional mint marks used when the Mexican mints switched mintmarks? I'm fairly new to the Mexican series and still finding a lot of surprises.
I am a learner of this era and the provincial mints as well. Potosi would be my best guess from the information I have at this time and I don't know of any other abbreviations. Also, thanks for posting that PDF. That is quite an interesting document in itself.
Do I have pics? Yes. Are they good pics? No. Here's what I was able to put together (using a dashcam camera & a 60x pocket loupe):
As you can tell from the pics, the 1871 is very low to the "South-West" of the coin (7:00) and there are striations on the edge. Regarding the mint mark, the "_S" is all that's really clear. The prior letter could be a D, P, G, Z, or even an emoticon for all I can tell. I was kind of hoping that this would be easy to attribute just by checking the date. What Mexican mints made 10 centavos in 1871? If there's only one with a "?_S" mint mark, then viola! DCH's suggestion seems to be the leading candidate. Am I correct that Guanjuato made 10 centavos in 1871 using the G_S mint mark? I would really appreciate a link to a list of all the Mexican 10 Centavo mintages for 1871 (or a copy-paste of the mint marks and mintage numbers). I paid silver melt for this, so I wasn't expecting a rare date or anything. But, it seems that the totals minted in 1871 were fairly small - is this a coin that I should consider getting slabbed?
Thanks Jello. That really clears things up... Oh - I just noticed the word "city" behind your pictures. With the line break, it looks like you're telling me it was struck in Mexico. ZsZ would be the Zacatecas mint, wouldn't it?
