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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SeptimusT, post: 2973019, member: 91240&quot;]I too envy the Divus Julius denarius.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, I hope this isn’t too much information, but in light of @TypeCoin971793’s museum find I did some research (I’m lucky to have access to lots of academic databases) that I think partially answers the question of whether they were holed in antiquity, and whether they were often grave goods.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Short answer</b>: They were often amulets or clothing decorations that were often incorporated into burials, and generally seem to have been holed within a few centuries of minting. Would the metal be strong enough to hole without breaking centuries later?</p><p><br /></p><p>Holed coins indicate the repurposing of coins for decorative or jewelry purposes. This is based on the observation of the placement of holed coins within a burial or in association with jewelry objects. As [USER=78244]@TypeCoin971793[/USER] suggested, they were sometimes put on a string, and laid in a grave. Coins with multiple holes were either strung or sewn into fabric. Since they were jewelry objects, we can assume they were used in life too, and wouldn’t just show up in burials. The Portable Antiquities Scheme shows lots of holed coins that don’t seem to be from graves. One study suggested they might sometimes have been passed down as family heirlooms.</p><p><br /></p><p>Someone tried to figure out when coins were holed in relation to when they were minted, based on grave finds (so as to have something to date them against). The short answer is that it varies, but many of them seem to have been turned into jewelry 1 or 200 years after they were minted. Other times relatively new coins were used.</p><p><br /></p><p>One interesting article I found talked about finding holed provincial coins far from their source cities, and speculated that they were devotional objects for soldiers from those cities.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here’s a plate that shows patterns of holed coins from a single cemetery (click to enlarge):</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH]729774[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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