Posted 06/05/2018 3:23 pm
No primary sources on field marks survive.
We do however have records indicating that mint employees were put to death for skimming silver from the coins. Roman bronzes at this time had an intentional, controlled silver content of about 3-5%. It would have been easy to remove a little bit from each coin, stashing away hundreds of pounds of silver when you work in a mint producing millions of coins a year.
Most likely, the control marks identified the manager or work team, to facilitate investigations into fraud/theft of the silver content.
We do however have records indicating that mint employees were put to death for skimming silver from the coins. Roman bronzes at this time had an intentional, controlled silver content of about 3-5%. It would have been easy to remove a little bit from each coin, stashing away hundreds of pounds of silver when you work in a mint producing millions of coins a year.
Most likely, the control marks identified the manager or work team, to facilitate investigations into fraud/theft of the silver content.
