I'm sure there are portion of us for whom this treasure trove recalls fond childhood memories of reading Dahl's short story The Mildenhall Treasure, a creative account of real events in 1942 surrounding the controversial finding of a huge cache of 4th century Roman silverware - one of the other great historical hoards dug up in modern Britain.
>A hoard of Norman-era silver coins unearthed five years ago in southwestern England has become Britain’s most valuable treasure find ever, after it was bought for £4.3 million ($5.6 million) by a local heritage trust.
Different article about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure...
>The exact value of the Sutton Hoo treasure isn't widely known, in part because the items in the treasure have never been up for sale. They were donated to the British Museum by Edith, and have remained there ever since. Typically, the items are described as "priceless," suggesting that their value to the museum and as historical artifacts makes them incredibly valuable.
>Given their historical significance, it's easy to imagine that the value of the items in the treasure would be valued in tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
> They were donated to the British Museum by Edith,
so they got a tax deduction at a completely arbitrary value, valued in a private document of an appraiser nobody has ever seen, and have just been rolling forward the tax deduction against their current year's tax liability for all eternity?
yes, but when compared to the US tax laws, that incentivize the same thing at much stricter limits, its not really worth saying since its a given
the US has a maximum 30% tax deduction for donated assets, while the UK has 100%. they both allow you to carry forward that tax deduction where it exceeds your current year tax liability. (I was inaccurate earlier, the carry forward is 3-5 years in both jurisdictions)
good business to arbitrarily value a piece and make sure all publications are unable to come to a value for something "priceless"
I don't find that controversial, I think its good business and inspirational. If I was in that position I would ensure the valuation was favorable
I'm not a tax lawyer, but as I understand it the 100% deduction is only for items accepted in lieu of inheritance tax, so not something you'll be rolling forward. The Cultural Gifts Scheme (which didn't exist at the time of the Sutton Hoo donation) does allow donations to be set against other taxes, but that is only to 30% of the value.
One wonders if they are worth face value given inflation. It would be a fun exercise to figure out their value in pounds sterling and then calculate what that number would be in the present.
That said, my kids and I buried 50 copper coins in a forest in the sierras, perhaps a thousand years from now the aliens visiting our dead planet will find them. :-(
It's have to be deflation for them to be worth more. The only thing here that would be the equivalent would be the value of the silver. I'm _guessing_ that the silver is worth like 1% of the valuation (from looking at the photos). Doesn't seem like it's 2500 kilos of silver (~$1100 per kg at current prices)!
>The only thing here that would be the equivalent would be the value of the silver
Not necessarily. A lot more silver has been mined since the Norman Conquest (for example in the New World, but also in the Old World) which increases its supply. The demand for and utility of silver in general has also changed since then.
Have you done any comparative economics? That is where you take what it "cost" in terms of money for goods or services at a given time and compare that to the cost of the same (or equivalent) goods and services in the present time. Some things like property ownership won't work because the rules changed so much between then and now but meals? Etc? might work.
Picking the 'BigMac index' might be fun, ie you try to price a Big Mac. (Since the Big Mac doesn't contain any tomatoes, you could probably have made a reasonable Big Mac clone in the Middle Ages.)
It gets ridiculous, if you go by the price of eg the amount of computation a human can do in a year. Or 'ice cubes in the height of summer'.
I could certainly see that. Now I'm wondering what someone would have bought with these pennies when they were actually coin of the realm.
Edit: per an up level comment, 15 chickens or half a knife? Hmm, chickens are easy the knife isn't. (wide variability in knife pricing). Given that the 'collectible' value has increased beyond the monetary value.
"There's a page at Regia Anglorum that tries to give some examples. The "d" indicates a silver penny. It [a silver penny] might buy 15 chickens, but it also might only buy half a knife (because metal is rare in comparison to chickens and requires a bunch of skilled labor to work it.)"
> perhaps a thousand years from now the aliens visiting our dead planet will find them. :-(
aliens will likely find us the same way we find dinosaurs but probably no one will find us. 1000 years from now things will be very different but i suspect humans will still exist. imo we as a species have very little chance of living 1M years, tho.
What could we do to increase our chances of lasting 1M years? I think it’s a useful thought experiment for thinking about what we could change to increase our chances.
I do disagree with you though and think humans are like cockroaches now and there is a 0% chance of exterminating every last one of us and that’s a good thing. Nature had its chance at several bottlenecks in the past and failed.
>One of the greatest human bottlenecks occurred between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, when the human population was reduced to about 1,280 breeding individuals for 117,000 years. This bottleneck may have brought human ancestors close to extinction.
> What could we do to increase our chances of lasting 1M years?
honestly? get the population down. this means less consumption on an industrial scale and letting vital ecosystems recover. i can't imagine a good way of voluntarily cutting the pop by 50% and keeping it flat afterwards, but famine would do it.
> For the group of seven metal detectorists who discovered the 2,584 silver pennies in the Chew Valley area, about 11 miles south of the city of Bristol, it marks a lucrative windfall since they will pocket half that sum. The landowner on whose property the coins were found will receive the other half.
I'm curious how this arrangement came about; is it mandated by law? Negotiated on a case-by-case basis? Is 50/50 the "standard" split?
You’d be surprised! It’s all about supply and demand. You can get very common Ancient Greek coins from 300 BC (eg ~2300 years old) for $50 these days. For example:
Do you have a coin shop in your town? If you do they tend to have a bit of everything (though most likely a focus on coins from the country you live in) and should have a few moderately priced ancient coins to choose from.
I do, but they do not. I'm the Midwest, small towns, coin shops are just very specific pawn shops. They have a fine selection of silver and gold new coins. Thanks for the suggestion though! I may drive to the nearest urban center to look. I hadn't thought of that.
If you want to be sure it's legit, try the site vcoins - they have a good selection of shops specializing in ancient greek coinage, and they have a good reputation for vetting.
Is there any particular city state / public person your friend is fond of? I'd plug that in their search bar and see what comes up.
I would choose another gift. The trade in ancient coins encourages looters to dig up ancient archeological sites, destroying their value to archeology.
I understand rarity and all, but it's still strange that there are US pennies worth far more than these coins. It makes sense, but instinctively feels wrong.
I think it's one of those things where people love US pennies because it's what they know and or grew up with (and possibly got them into collecting) - at least in the US. I always got the impression that collecting ancient coins like this was much less mainstream than people collecting the coins of the country that they currently live in.
Yes, exactly. Relative to roman coins there are much rarer limited run coins or accidents that have a lot of value now. But there are also rare-ish coins that no one cares about, like things minted specifically for collectability, say some hypothetical, commemorative Princess Diana coin that got made and marketed to rip people off who bought into the idea it would gain value.
I believe every country has a business like that nowadays, or a side-business from the official Mint that makes coins. And it's not even about whether it would appreciate in value tbh, they are a good medium for collecting and encoding important events or celebrating something.
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth. In turn, these sectors of the economy become more expensive over time, because their input costs increase while productivity does not. Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods, and in particular health, education, arts and culture.
This is a really roundabout way of referencing the scene in Silicon Valley where he figures out the new algorithm while everyone else is having a side conversation about how best to manage the conference attendees.
I don't think so - hoards like this tend to get found often enough and as far as I know the market for these sorts of coins hasn't cratered in recent times.
I presume they would come with a certificate of authenticity from a respectable source. Also, it's not in the interest of an auction house to sell fake coins. I'd be much more skeptical if it was on ebay.
You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get the fun of very carefully removing the encrustations to reveal the coin underneath. You generally ended up with a coin worth about what you paid for it, but it was fun.
I was similarly surprised recently when I found out you can legally purchase many ancient artifacts, like lamps, seals, and burial items. They're by no means cheap, but they aren't priceless treasures either. We've always mass produced stuff, and the museums aren't interested in most of it.
Supply and demand. In Europe or Asia it is very normal to find Gold or Silver coins, because they are Noble or semiNoble materials and do not degrade, or do it very little. For archeologists is not very valuable.
What is really precious for History is finding materials that usually degrade like cloth or wood or iron things from thousands of years ago.
An archeologist that finds a gold coin is like: Meh. if he finds wood from +2000 years, it will change her life. You will see her celebrating like an Athlete winning the olympics.
My first reaction to news of these discoveries is a twinge of grief, thinking about the poor sod who didn't make it back. Take the Lewis chessmen. He was probably a guy just trying to make a simple business importing chess sets, and someone whacked him.
Firstly, the UK is three separate legal jurisdictions, each with their own rules on metal detecting: England/Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.
Secondly, these rules are not binary legal/illegal, but on a continuum of permissiveness. You always need some kind of permission. England/Wales is more permissive (where most non-protected land can be detected on with the landowner's permission) than the Republic of Ireland (where you need state approval to use a metal detector anywhere).
"It illegal to use a detection device to search for archaeological objects anywhere within the State or its territorial seas; without the prior written consent of the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht"
That, to me, implies there's a lot of unfound treasures over there... and/or a lot of illegal searching. Assuming there's interest outside of archeological value, of course.
Some good Samaritans sometimes send in Ireland's priceless heritage to the national museum. But of course they're not going to reveal who they are, or where they found it. They don't want to go to prison. So I guess we'll never know.
Most countries have similar rules, and that's also the standard (rarely prosecuted) view in international law. The general rule of thumb is that antiquities belong to the state, anything else (like treasure hoards in the UK) is an atypical exception.
Yes, obviously it's legal in England, or the coins wouldn't have been found, reported, and ultimately sold, as per the article. It's also legal in Ireland.
There are prohibitions and licensing requirements in both countries for search of heritage sites, national monuments, and other protected sites, and reporting requirements for unintentional "heritage" finds.
The article's image of the hoard shows, off to the sides, various coins that look sliced in half. Did this modification occur to coins during this time period? Did the coins remain valid but half their value? If so, how many times could a coin be subdivided?
Coins used to be largely worth what they were worth because of what they were made of. So cutting them in half would lead to two seperate halves of the value. I'm sure there's more nuance than that but broadly I think that's how it used to work.
This is not so much a gradual change, as a recurring theme in coinage through history, with the stability and grasp of a regime/kingdom/empire being related to how much seigniorage (profit) it can currently extract from the economy by putting the leader's face on a costly bit of metal. This may be from one of many periods where the old coinage of an obsolete regime reverted to holding negligible value over its metal value.
Everyone in it seems to be doing these dodgy "oo ur" West Country farmer caricature. I can't think of a single character with an actual Suffolk accent.
If I compare to The Dig[1], another great film about finding buried treasure in Suffolk[2], Ralph Fiennes nails it[3].
It's like the good ol' days when the BBC used get Rada trained actors to put on "Cockney" accents to represent the working classes.
2. Sutton Hoo, a set of long boats commerating dead Anglo-Saxon kings. Probably the greatest treasure ever found in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo
Detectorists is filmed in Suffolk, but it's set in Essex. Not that that makes the accents any more appropriate. Mackenzie Crook is just using his natural accent though, which is Kentish.
Oh yeah I totally agree, it is highly fictional. I mean it's Netflix, so I would definitely treat it as nothing more than entertainment.
I'm half surprised they didn't try to work Sutton Hoo's proximity to the Rendlesham Forest Incident in there to spice things up with an alien landing[1]. It's literally just over the road.
