in antiquity, coins became worthless.
The problem of the “end of money” in late antiquity has long preoccupied historians. By about 400 AD, bronze coinage, the basis of everyday payments, had ceased to flow into the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire. Gold and silver were still circulating, but only for large transactions and taxes.
What ordinary people used to buy bread, wine or handicrafts remained a mystery for a long time. Some researchers believed that the old coins continued to circulate on their own, others – that their place was taken by natural exchange, others – that people moved to the weight system, where any metal went into business. Direct evidence for the latter hypothesis has been lacking until recently.
Metal replaced coins
The contents of a wallet from an early 5th-century male burial excavated back in 1964 have only now been reinterpreted. The results of the study were published by the journal Britannia. A military belt with zoomorphic decoration and a massive fibula clasp on the shoulder gave away the buried man was a Roman soldier. He lived at the very turning point when the new coinage disappeared and people had not yet forgotten how to use it.
There were four coins in the wallet. Three of them were heavy bronze sestertii and dupondii from the time of Trajan and Hadrian, minted three hundred years before the owner’s death. The fourth is a tiny bronze coin of Valentinian II with the goddess of victory Victoria on the reverse, issued between 388 and 402. It was this coin that made it possible to date the entire burial. In addition to the coins, the wallet contained a handful of bronze scrap.
The authors of the article weighed each item and found a pattern. The combined weight of all the coins was 56.77 grams – that’s almost exactly two Roman ounces. The weight of the bronze scrap – 6.63 grams without one lost fragment, that is almost a quarter of an ounce. A similar picture is observed in a wallet from Tongeren, found and examined earlier. There the coins weighed a little more than one and a half ounces in total, which is also close to the round weight value.
