The British TV documentary series
Time Team did an episode with some experimental archaeology regarding the making of large bronze coins in ancient times. Now "experimental archaeology" in this context is really just "taking modern replicas of the tools we know the ancients had and trying to use them", without actually using a time machine to watch how ancient peoples actually used them, so given that caveat, the show came to the following conclusions:
- Cutting blank planchets off of a tube of copper, "cob-style", simply wouldn't have worked - copper is too tough to make a clean cut with ancient technology, and the amount of labour needed to round off and flatten the blank properly simply couldn't have been time-effective. As such, individual casting of blanks seems more probable.
- Cold-striking a copper or bronze coin using the big-guy-with-a-hammer method simply didn't work - virtually no detail came through onto the finished coin, even after multiple strikings.
- Heating the blanks before striking worked a treat and created very authentic-looking coins.
"We tried striking coins cold and it just didn't work" seems to be the consistent result from experimental archaeology; assuming the archaeologists haven't missed some obvious flaw in their reasoning, the resultant conclusion is that they must have been struck hot, despite the extra care and labour this would have had to entail compared to cold striking. Even hot-striking requires a 2 or 3 blows of the hammer to fully strike up the details on a large bronze coin, which perfectly accounts for the doubling often seen on large Ptolemaic bronzes.
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Lemme get this straight .
It is reasonable to assume that Roman engineers constructed machines capable of hurling cannon ball sized 'ballista' upwards of a quarter mile and impacting targets at over 100 mph
Yet we are to assume they relied on "Moe Larry & Curly" when issuing one and two ounce bronze coins and medallions
We have plenty of physical and graphical evidence of Roman military hardware. We don't have any such evidence for the use of drop-hammers or similar mechanisms to aid in coinage production, despite having a few surviving depictions of mint activity.
Could the ancient Romans have built a coin press? Sure. We know they had powerful water-powered drop hammer technology because we've found physical archaeological evidence for them at mine sites in Spain and Wales, used for crushing ore.
Did they use them for striking coins? There's no evidence, so until and unless some kind of actual evidence that they did so comes to light, we have to assume they didn't - that's just how archaeology works. Archaeology is a science, so it's all about what the surviving evidence states; discussing how things "might have been" without such evidence is really just writing historical fan-fiction. Maybe at some point in Roman history, somebody with access to water-powered drop hammers tried to experimentally adapt those drop-hammers to strike coins; maybe it didn't work well, or maybe they concluded it was simply easier to buy a couple of hefty slaves and go back to making coins the old-fashioned way. If this happened, no physical evidence survives and no written records either. All we can conclude from the archaeology is "It doesn't appear to have been used".
It's not entirely unlike the question of the ancient discovery of the Americas. "
Could the Romans have sailed to America?" Yes, technically, we know from archaeology and written records that their ships had that capability. "
Did the Romans sail to America?" Well, there's no physical evidence one way or the other for this either in America or in the Mediterranean, nor in surviving written sources, apart from the old "absence of evidence" argument (for example, if the Romans had visited the Americas, why were there never any pumas or jaguars in the Colosseum?). So we have to presume the answer is either "No, they didn't", or "If they did, they somehow did it in such a way that it left no permanent mark on Roman society".
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Posted 03/18/2026 10:29 am
