Favorite Coins of 2017 : The $1 - $100 List

I LOVE that Pontos coin!!

 

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I disagree. I have the Stannard article and it says "The mean weight of the gouged pieces in appendix 1 is 3.86 grams with a standard deviation of 0.11 grams. The same includes a high proportion of worn coins. .... The present weight of the coins therefore shows that the blanks were considerably heavier before gouging."

He goes on to note that the mean weight of fresh ungouged pieces in the Cosa hoard is 3.88 grams. This shows that the gouged coins must have been typically the heavier coins before gouging. He does think batches of coins were accepted al marco, but the flans were intentionally made on average a tiny bit heavy (it is easier to adjust weight down than up!) and "a few heavier pieces were sorted out by eye, gouged, and tossed back until the proper balance resulted."

He also notes the weight distributions are negatively skewed. If they were originally normally distributed, That means the heavy end was removed by making the coins originally in it lighter.

Think about it. If you handled thousands of denarii of various weights every day, don't you think that after a while you could identify the slightly heavier ones? I think I could, and I think they did. If the total weight of the batch was okay, they did nothing. If it was more than enough, they selected some heavy ones and gouged them.

The evidence is that in large groups of Republican coins or flans at the mint, heavy ones (not light ones) were identified and gouged to reduce their weights.

 

Good point. I'm pretty sure I would, by hand, and perhaps even to some extent (less effectively) by eye. I imagine it would still take extra time to specifically fish out the slightly heavier ones, and as the evidence you mention points to this being the case, even of the batch was being accepted adjusted 'al marco', there must have been the explicit instruction for the mint workers to take the extra effort to pick out overweight flans even if technically they weren't required to. Extra points if you did, perhaps?