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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 3141561, member: 80804&quot;]Oldhoopster said: &quot;When I was new to ancients in the early 2000’s, I used to buy the uncleaned lots that were filled with LRBs. FWIW, The easiest way for me to ID them was using Late Roman Bronze Coinage by Carson, Kent, and Hill. As long as I could pick up some of the legends, I could usually ID many of them or at least narrow it down.&quot; </p><p>Oldhoopster touches on a most important point here. It&#039;s really startlingly easy to overlook the fact that if you take the time to read the legends on your coins (learn to read the letter-forms, learn &quot;what to look for&quot;, etc.) you will be much farther along in the process than you would if what you&#039;re doing amounts to pattern-recognition in wildwinds. Usually, if readable, the legends will give you 100% of the information you need (along with details like bust style) to fully identify and reference LRB&#039;s. Wildwinds is a great resource - I use it all the time - but not for this sort of thing. For LRB&#039;s you&#039;d do better to use the Helvetica spreadsheets. Hopefully you have access to MSExcel in some form or another? If you don&#039;t, there are free downloads of utility suites mirroring MSOffice apps including Excel - &quot;Open Office&quot; is one, there are others. </p><p>The thing that really makes Helvetica worthwhile to use is that it employs an intuitive process of elimination based on what you can read. You start with a list of 100% of all the varieties/mints/rulers etc, for your given type, and as you make choices about what appears on your coin from a line of drop-down menus at the top of the grid. Every item you enter deletes all the types from the list which do not have that feature. If you can reasonably well read the legends, this is probably the fastest way for a beginner to get something like an accurate reference number for an accepted standard reference. LRBC is a terriffic resource, too. It was for many years an unofficial volume of RIC which covered a lot of the holes left before the publication of RIC vols. VII, VIII &amp; X. It was even made the same size and shape format as the RIC books to easily fit on the same shelf. However, many find it quite daunting at first glance. It has a fairly steep learning curve, but it&#039;s a learning curve that&#039;s really worth expending the time and energy to familiarize yourself with the factors you will need to consider in attribution in general. It will arm you with a ton of useful information about things you need to look for and note like legend varieties, legend break varieties, bust types, field marks, etc. Unfortunately at first glance it can be, as I said, daunting. I know folks who compare their first glance at a page in LRBC as being similar to the graphic in the opening credits of &quot;The Matrix&quot; with incomprehensible columns of mixed characters streaming down all over the page and not a single photo or word of explanation on any of the grid pages. Stick a post-it note in between the sections I &amp; II (pg. 40/41) where all the descriptions are listed and use it as a handy bookmark to get back to the lists from which the abbreviations for the types, etc, are chosen.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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