I recently found this piece of metal and I believe it is Aes Rude..I checked today and it contains Copper, Tin and Lead..Its a 113 grams!
I am no expert. If this was found in Central Italia, I would call this an Aes Formatum. However I am curious of the name that is local to the ancient Britons, since you are in Britain. This looks the same, and I feel as you do about this as a hunk of bronze that may had been used as proto money or a trade ingot! Cool find and congrats!!! My Aes Italia Aes Rude - bronze ca 5th-4th Century BCE 29.7mm 32.4g roughly an uncia ITALIA Aes Formatum AE Bronze Ax Head ca 5th-4th C BCE sextans size 44.8mm 56g
The metal composition does not look like any Italian aes pieces of any kind I've ever seen. I do not think it was ever any kind of money.
Where did you find it? I think that a piece like yours with a find spot is better than the piece by itself. Cast bronze was used as money in Italy before they produced coins (see note below). It is hard to tell what was money, a votive item, metal for use, etc. Your piece looks like what I call pieces of broken bronze plate in my cast bronze collection. Find locations in Italian Cast Coinage by I Vecchi are: Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Croatia & Bosnia. That does not mean cast bronze was not used in other places. What is Money? According to D. B. Holland in "Money in the Late Roman Republic" it was something used as: •Medium of exchange: recognized by many to have value, facilitates trade; examples: land, cattle, sheep, bullion, shells, etc. •Measure of value: to determine equivalent trade value, ie – how many eggs equal a modius of flour •Unit of account: to balance books, determine tax rate, set social standing for senate & army (see below) •Store of wealth, needs to be something that is: “small”, will hold value, will not degrade with time •Means of payment: pay soldiers and other military expenses, pay taxes, buy (luxury) goods from outside community By this definition, the cast bronze was money.
Here's a large "aes formatum": "Aes rude are amorphous pieces of bronze of irregular weight without any official stamp or mark while aes formatum are pieces of bronze which have a certain shape." - Bertol & Farac (2012), Aes rude and aes formatum - a new topology based on the revised Mazin Hoard Roman Republican, aes formatum, rough brick shape, ~5th-4th century BC, Central Italy (ex private collection ex Munich auction house 1990s) Obv: oxidized bronze Rev: oxidized bronze Size: 615g, 103 cubic cm.
Aes formatum - part of a bar. 464 grams - found in a hoard near Castelfranco , Emilia Romagna, central Italy c. 1898.
More, smaller aes formatum. also, bronze ax from central Italy c. 6th-4th century BC. These were also used as trade items; form of proto money. I imagine this could also be termed aes formatum since as Alegandron has mentioned that term simly means with form in Latin. An interesting aside about the term formatum - Roman soldiers in camp made their own cheese. They carried with them a mold to make the cheese in, which was called a "formatum" loosely translated as that which gives it a form or shape. The Latin for cheese is caseum. They called the cheese "caseum formatum" or shaped cheese. The word for cheese in Italian (formaggio) , and in French (fromage) actually comes from formatum (the wooden mold or apparatus) rather than the actual word for the cheese itself.
