Early Christmas Gift: 1,800 Year Old Piggy Bank Unearthed In French Village

Don't mean to sound cynical naive or simplistic but don't finds like this have a great (depressing) effect on the price of ancient coins ?

I agree JBuck. Many times hoards like this are absorbed into museum collections. Might hit the open market someday but personally I doubt it.

The INRAP is the French government archaeological team, who are sent in whenever something large or significant is unearthed. Anything they dig up is government-owned and will remain so, with these coins presumably eventually interred in a local museum once the university numismatists have fully catalogued them. So this specific hoard is going to have no effect on market values, since they're not "part of the market".

As for the more general principle, hoards when they are dumped onto the market don't tend to have a major impact on market values. This is because the vast majority of large Roman coin hoards are made up of all different types of coins, rather than one single type or even one single emperor. So on the "supply" side of the price equation, the numbers available of each specific coin type aren't significantly increased, since even a large hoard is unlikely to have more than a dozen examples of any one coin type.

What does tend to have a more significant impact on coin supply (and therefore market value) is the sudden opening up of archaeological regions that were formerly either closed to Western collectors or tightly controlled. Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain fell, Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars and American occupations, and Syria since the outbreak of civil war there, are all examples of this occurring; coins from those locations used to be scarce and hard to come by, now they are all quite common.