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Message:: [QUOTE="red_spork, post: 3187520, member: 74282"]Cleaning ancient coins is normal and necessary and I doubt you realize how much cleaning has gone into the coins you see that have beautiful patinas. I don't think people should completely strip the hard patina above the metal surface from bronzes because that generally results in loss of detail and actually damages the coin but there's generally quite a bit of dirt and crud before you get to that and it needs to be removed to reveal detail. This is even more true for silver where you often have to remove the crud entirely to reveal the detail. If not, that's great and I've seen and own some beautiful coins where that's the case, but that's maybe 2-5% of ancient silver coins as the vast majority have detail obscured by silver oxidation and sulphur compounds and if you're really unlucky, horn silver. Realistically, there's nothing historic about this crud: it was formed long after the last person ever handled the coin in antiquity, sometimes that crud was even formed in modern times due to the advent and heavy use of synthetic fertilizers in the last century or so. The history of it is "the coin sat in the ground and interacted with whatever was around it".[/QUOTE]