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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1365071, member: 19463&quot;]People read in the press about finds of thousands of Roman coins found in pots and the interest these hoards raise in scholarly circles.&nbsp; What we don&#039;t hear so often is the finds of thousands of metal detectorists who spent Saturday finding lumps of dirty metal and sorted them into old coins, new coins, artifacts and scrap metal.&nbsp; If a group of uncleaned coins is really unsearched, you should expect to get an occasional new coin or button.&nbsp; Detectorists can sell their finds to wholesale buyers who should sort out the errors but some of them are not beyond salting the groups with modern fakes and even real ancients that have been cleaned and redirtied (because they were junk and worth more as an unknown).&nbsp; If you see a bag of 1000 ancients for sale, you can not assume that they were found together.&nbsp; Much more likely is that they were gathered together and sorted by size and someone&#039;s opinion on whether they were likely to clean up into a nice coin with individual value or something that will sell cleaned for half what it brought dirty. </p><p><br /></p><p>To those who don&#039;t believe in ancient coins I&#039;ll just ask why bother reading this forum?&nbsp; I generally suspect such posts come from those who subscribe to the cultural heritage elitists who can not cope with the fact that they made a million of the things and then went home for the day only to do it again the next.&nbsp;&nbsp; Aunt was right, 99% of the output rotted or was melted down to make whatever was current.&nbsp; That is why we only have a few million of the things left to collect.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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