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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 4597711, member: 74282&quot;]There is a character limit on these comments and one can only submit so much, but I would encourage those who have not yet submitted a comment to highlight a few things I neglected to mention in mine. Namely, Italy in no way has a monopoly on the current restricted types. The existing MOU mentions &quot;Coins of Italian Types&quot; and specifically names &quot;1. Lumps of bronze (Aes Rude)&quot;, &quot;2. Bronze bars (Ramo Secco and Aes Signatum)&quot;, &quot;3. Cast coins (Aes Grave)&quot;, &quot;4. Struck coins—Struck coins of the Roman Republic and Etruscan cities produced in gold, silver, and bronze</p><p>from the 3rd century B.C. to c. 211 B.C.,&quot;(this includes, for instance, quadrigati).</p><p><br /></p><p>A naive collector or archaeologist who hasn&#039;t deeply studied these types of coins might think this all sounds like stuff you&#039;d only ever find in Italy but that is not the case. Italo Vecchi, in Italian Cast Coinage pp. 25 &amp; 28 cites published finds from Illyria(modern-day Bosnia &amp; Croatia) containing aes rude and bronze bars. Furthermore, Pierluigi Debernardi and Olivier Legrand, in &quot;Roman Republican Silver Coins of the Quadrigatus Period Struck in Spain&quot;, RBN 2015 pp. 273-292, publish multiple series of pre-denarius Roman coins reliably linked to Spanish mints. To suggest that these are only found in Italy is patently false and the evidence against this is out there and easily accessible, so there really is no reason they should have blanket restrictions applied like this. And even for the series reliably linked to Italy, realistically coin types should be looked at not from their mint location but from their areas of circulation. The Italian economy stretched far outside of Italy even before the arbitrary 211 B.C. cutoff point that the MoU references. It is intellectually dishonest to treat pre-denarius Roman coins as &quot;coins of Italian types&quot; when the Roman and Italian economies had such wide influence. It is as if one called a Denver mint quarter, a coin of &quot;Colorado type&quot;, that&#039;s just not how money works.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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