Getting Started with Celtic Coins – Crude and Barbarous, or Just Different?
7 comments
·May 11, 2025jstrieb
pbarry25
100% this. Really trippy abstraction path over time. Reminds me of how Picasso's style evolved over his career (his early output is amazingly realistic, but his style shifted over time to inform his much-better-known abstract works later in his life).
Noumenon72
Honestly it doesn't look like the Celts were "practitioners of abstract art" and more like they just lacked the concept of mass producing from an original. "When they tell me make copies of silver staters, I pulls one out of my pocket and I makes the copies." Humans instinctively recognize whether a face is well-smithed and genuine, but you would have to train everyone what these designs were supposed to represent and how to appreciate that.
It just seems like they let things degenerate because they weren't trying to do art but just do things the way they'd always done them, with no controls on data degradation between generations.
dr_dshiv
Mind blowing. I have an abstract coin from Gujarat India, c 800 AD, showing a mushroom. Mysterious.
aurizon
Watch for Chinese coin fakers. They have a huge presence on Ebay with coins that look good, but some have huge errors, wrong years, wrong mint marks. They also do it with other old coins. They are into the $10-$50 coins. The Tungsten coins that are all over China now are so valuable that few buy on Ebay. Sonic chirp meters detect them. On youtube = fake gold china will give hits. One good method is a scintillation detector. Few old gold coins or Roman/Celtic coins have any nuclear isotopes from WW2 or the atmospheric test era. Geiger counters are usually not good enough. The modern fakes are easily spotted with the correct scintillation detector, which has a fair sized scintillation stone. The low cost ali-express radiation detectors are a lot less sensitive
staplers
This is something I've spent a fair amount of time studying (abstraction of language, writing, culture) and often material changes such as this come from changes in tooling and process. An example: A small change comes about due to pencil -> pen, and then very abruptly from pen->keyboard.
You start seeing it in everything the more you learn.
dendrite9
Are there any books or articles that discuss this that you think are worth reading and aren't too dense/academic? I find in interesting but I wouldn't say it is something I've studied.
Even if you don't read the article, and even if (like me) you don't particularly care about coin collecting, you should still scroll to the bottom for the cool photos showing how the designs became more abstract over time.