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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3095504, member: 19463&quot;]There are too many considerations to give answers to many questions that will hold for all issues.&nbsp; Some mints may have used one die pair until there was a failure and then replaced the failed die but never used more than one set at a time.&nbsp; Other mints may have had several teams working side by side but may not have used the same pairings of dies on Tuesday that they used on Monday.&nbsp; That system would make it harder to assign an order.&nbsp; I have one obverse die used with six different reverses and have seen coins that linked to at least a dozen different mates.&nbsp; We need to be careful when studying such a system to understand that there may be more than one way to explain that evidence. Recently Curtis Clay demonstrated at least to my satisfaction that some striking teams shared one obverse die with two reverses at the same time.&nbsp; This explains some reverse doublestrikes where the two were from different dies but the obverse showed no doubling.&nbsp; This also makes sense since reverse dies probably would heat up more from striking and benefit from the &#039;rest&#039;.&nbsp; We don&#039;t &#039;know&#039; everything we would like but testing such theories against the evidence is a beneficial tool to understanding our subject.&nbsp; It is a big mistake to assume that something proven for one mint at one time would be the same at another mint on another day.&nbsp; The old saying about wishing to be &#039;the fly on the wall&#039; so we could observe what was going on applies here.&nbsp; There are no records, no diaries of mint workers and no certain proofs of so many things in ancient numismatics.&nbsp; We do the best we can.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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