Did The Carthaginians Set Foot In Nova Scotia?

It could have been deposited by a collector at a later date if not....HOLY SHEKEL! Call the news, call everyone!

Yep. Not even really debated anymore. :)




Now as far as Carthaginians; they were excellent mariners and it is certainly possible but without more evidence, you simply have to go with the most likely explanation that they were deposited by somebody else afterwards. Perhaps Vikings, or Spaniards, perhaps a modern collector. Who knows. certainly an interesting mystery.

I'm studying to become an archaeologist. I call dibs on the site if he finds more!

it's a great lookin' coin also. however it got there, it's got a great story...i wish it could tell it.

To play devils advocate... How would we know what it is supposed to look like? I mean, no one can say for sure just based on it's condition. We have no data on what coins buried in Canadian soil for two thousand years should look like.

This is fun to think and debate about! Though I know it is most likely planted or lost by some careless collector it's still super cool to imagine all the possibilities.

I'm sure that soil chemistry plays a large role in preservation, such as ph and elements present in the water like sulfur.
That said, the OP's coin looks a little more like one from an arid climate--am I seeing some 'desert patina'?

The climate in Nova Scotia is not too dissimilar to the climate in Britain and Europe, and the geology is much the same. I don't see any reason why "Ancient Nova Scotian bronze coins" would look any different to European ones. And European ones, freshly dug up, typically look like little green rocks. They need work to make them look like coins.

As for the "rewrite the histories" crowd, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a couple of coins wrenched out of their archaeological context by a metal detectorist isn't going to qualify. There are many logical reasons why this coin could not have been dropped by a passing Carthaginian, some of which have been mentioned already.

One not yet mentioned is this: bronze coins rarely circulated beyond the city of issue. They were issued as token currency, exchangeable for silver only on the word and promise of the city government and the moneylenders operating under city license. They were worthless beyond the regions of the city's control, and doubly worthless when trading with barbarians. The circulation of bronze coins needs all the trappings of civilization that a full-fledged colony would bring, and we would see the evidence easily: ruins, graves, pottery shards by the bucketful.

When Phoenician traders visited Cornwall, England to trade for tin, they left precious little evidence behind that they were there. They were also equivocal with their Greek customers when it came to describing exactly where the tin came from, lest the Greeks go looking for it themselves. But there is enough evidence, from both the on-the-ground archaeology and the historical writings, to put their presence there beyond doubt. To the best of my knowledge, no Phoenician bronze coins have ever been found in an archaeologically correct context in Cornwall. Why not? The Phoenicians did not come to settle; they came, traded, and went away again. And bronze coins would have been useless, except perhaps to explain to the more thickheaded locals what they wanted the tin for.