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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 24840230, member: 26430&quot;]I think yes, that is partly the case. I&#039;ve seen it explained by four contributing factors: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars" rel="nofollow">Yugoslavian Civil War(s)</a>, c. 1991-2001; the fall of the Iron Curtain (c. 1989-1991); the proliferation of high quality, low-cost metal detectors (beginning slightly earlier in some places); and ebay (c. late 1990s, where most of those coins were sold, literally millions of them, directly to collectors for the first time, rather than to local distributors or coin dealers in Vienna or Munich or Zurich).</p><p><br /></p><p>There are actually many scholarly papers that discuss the ancient coin market in that region/period, both as a specific historical event and as part of the broader pattern of antiquities &quot;mining&quot; &amp; trade in conflict zones. (I haven&#039;t opened up my bibliography on it, but if anyone&#039;s interested, I can try to share more notes &amp; references.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Usually I think of that period as beginning in the mid/late 1990s. I see it discussed every so often in coin groups, sometimes described as a sort of &quot;golden age&quot; of eBay or of uncleaned coins; of course, people in the law enforcement and archaeological world have a very different perspective on it.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think there may be some question of how many of those coins had been stockpiled &amp; warehoused over many years (if so, someone speculated very wisely!), as opposed to all having been metal-detected post-1990. I do think there&#039;s agreement, though, that the &quot;easy finds&quot; in the Balkans were mostly harvested and exhausted well before 2010 (i.e., within half a meter of the surface, or whatever the exact number).</p><p><br /></p><p>New coins are still coming out in large numbers, but it&#039;s nothing like what there was 20-25 years ago (when the $300 &quot;unopened bags of 1,000 uncleaned Roman coins&quot; included everything up to Sestertii and Dupondii, often &quot;easy cleaners&quot; in beautiful condition, and there would still actually be a certain number of good silver Denarii and AR Antoniniani, etc.).</p><p><br /></p><p>(If you consider what that means for archaeological sites -- that, within 10-20 years, virtually every site in the region had been found by detectorists and unsystematically dug up, whether coins were present or not -- it becomes easier to understand why some people get upset about coin collecting and think of it as &quot;looting.&quot;)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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