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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 2429753, member: 44316&quot;]The original author about this gouging practice agrees with Carausius and not what I wrote above. Stannard&#039;s article &quot;The adjustment al marco of the weight of Roman Republican denarii blanks by gouging&quot; proposes that the average blank was cast a little bit to high in weight (to keep the randomly lower-weight ones from the Gaussian distribution still reasonably high) and then the heavy ones were selected out to be lowered in weight, making the overall total for a batch what is should be [page 49].</p><p><br /></p><p>He defines &quot;al peso&quot; as &quot;adjustment is intended to bring each individual piece within a certain weight of the standard.&quot; For &quot;al marco&quot; he says &quot;weight and tale are managed only by batch, with the aim of getting a fixed number of blanks from a fixed weight of metal, without too much attention begin paid to the weights of individual blanks.&quot; [page 47]</p><p><br /></p><p>So, the Romans adjusted the weights of some individual blanks downward. Stannard suggests that is because the total was purposely a bit too high and the total was adjusted downward the right amount by taking some off of selected heavier blanks. Thus the total is adjusted to be right which would in some sense be &quot;al marco.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Nevertheless, there is quite a bit of downward variation in weights of denarii as every collector knows. Slightly lighter coins were clearly accepted. I think the mint would be more concerned that heavy blanks would make heavy coins which would be pulled from circulation. They didn&#039;t want to give too much silver away. The adjusted coins were, obviously, adjusted individually. All his gouged examples have weights which are in a narrow range around their average of 3.86 grams (the standard is 3.90 or 3.88) which means they were too heavy to begin with and now very close to the standard.&nbsp; Adjusting individual coins seems like &quot;al peso&quot; weights to me. He argues this reduces the tail of the weight distribution at the higher end, which would reduce the total, which is certainly true. But, was this done to reduce the total (Stannard), or to reduce the individual pieces (me)?&nbsp; That is the difference between <i>al marco</i> and <i>al peso. </i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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