Mexico War For Ind. 1812 Sud, Oaxaca 8 Reales Cast Silver

One of the accepted telltale signs for the forgeries is indeed the plain edge. Of course, there is always the possibility that one or the other original might have slipped through the "edge reeding procedure" back in Morelos' coining operations camp, but I would not touch any coin with a plain edge.

The problem is that apparently the forgers have caught on to this as well, as I have received reports of forgeries with hand reeded edges lately. Some of these coins could be identified as modern fakes due to their telltale signs of certain small design features (excess metal, etc.) that tell that they were made from the same mold of a forger.

My own example, which I am sure is a modern forgery although I bought it through Ponterio, shows very slight attempts at reeding as well. It looks exactly like the one pictured in the Krause-Mishler catalog, right down to the denticles, which made me think :-)

But then, there are even known modern modern fantasies of this series listed as good coins in K-M, so why should I wonder?

Silver coins of the Insurgents were deliberately made of base silver to get more coins out of a certain amount of silver. Remember that most of the Morelos coinage was fiat money made of copper.
However, it is unknown if this applies to ALL Morelos silver coinage. It is definitely true for the cast copies of Colonial 8 reales which were then counterstamped (the Insurgents' production, not the ones from Chihuahua or Monclova), but not much is known about the cast coins of the typical Morelos style.

A closer study is of course more than warranted. However, it will be difficult to definitely establish a difference between originals (crudely cast, most likely underweight and/or of base silver, hand reeded edges) from modern ones (crudely cast, most likely underweight and/or of base silver, hand reeded edges) - unless there is no edge reeding or the readings speak of "modern" alloys...