And of course it goes without saying that they've appeared made out of non-metal materials.
And also your reputation is based mostly on word of mouth. That's how it still works in rural societies today.
If there were any such certification for metalurgists it would have been a small one like a ring or a bracelet.
There were plenty of captured slaves from conquered peoples, but skilled metalworkers would hardly belong to that group.
This had little to do with serfdom, and practices that would fit under what we might call serfdom were extremely varied from time and place. It would have been very rare for someone to have the means, ability, and desire to move far from their home yet couldn't because they were somehow legally bound to land owned by a lord (who only had power over that one area anyhow).
Same way we ended with almost everyone in Ireland speaking English as their main language?
violent conquest, followed by a brutal subjugation and a cultural genocide.
There wouldn't be such extensive roads if they didn't.
Travel with luggage is what I was referring to as rare for most people.
During roman period most likely people traveled for festivals.
Archaeologists have found what could be temporarily built up areas for festivals. And it is known that festivals were a big thing that gave the population a break from work.
Which is what I personally would like to connect with the famous penis pendants, but nobody knows for sure. They could just be fertility symbols related to courtship and marriage.
FYI I'm doing a lot of guessing here, which is apt when it comes to discussing dodecahedrons. In my opinion you can look at contemporary, or near contemporary, rural communities and see a lot of similarities with ancient society.
Serfdom (or a comparable system) and other strong legal limitations on social mobility were certainly a thing in the 300s.
> so plenty of people moved from place to place, likely dozens or hundreds of times in their lives.
I’m not sure how is it particularly different from medieval Europe in that way?
But there are other reasons why traveling and moving to different regions was relatively rare for most people (e.g. almost everyone was extremely reliant on their local social networks, so moving to a different community was very costly). Of course metalworkers and other highly skilled craftsmen were probably always one of the most mobile groups (in pre-Roman times and during the middle ages as well)
Having one of these in your possession would be enough to get you in the door, as well as giving your potential employer a quick and easy way to judge the quality of your work. The alternative would be to require a prospective employee to make a dodecahedron in front of you, which doesn’t really provide all that much of a benefit in the long term.
Has anyone ever tried matching the sizes/circumferences of the coins with the holes?
Could have been used as a auto-coin sorting device?
This is pretty much how it worked pre-internet
2000 years of poor and homeless people looking for any metal they can sell as scrap.
That's why I don't buy the apprentice argument that always pops up in these discussions.
In this case you'd be excused for saying it's some sort of ritualistic object. Because rituals are important in people's lives, important enough to create and carry around metal and stone objects with you. And rituals pervade all of society.
I don't claim to know what it is, but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.
That's not really true. There's regular finds of hoards of thousands of ancient coins that are in excellent condition, esp. Roman coins. You'll find there's an actually quite a large number of ancient metal artifacts archaeologists have discovered if you look into it. Certainly the preservation rate is very low since people tend to guard metal objects and recycle them, but things happen, today archaeologists estimate there's something in the order of 10-30 millions of Roman coins that have been recovered in museum collections and held by private owners.
This depends on the metal, of course, iron preserves poorly as does bronze, so those are rare, but gold preserves extremely well, and silver better than bronze, esp. in drier conditions.
And of course if something is buried, and everyone involved dies before retrieving it, then it survives. But a lot of circumstances have to line up for that to happen.
We’re talking about tiny pieces of copper, though. Would it really have been that expensive to be worth the trouble (unless you had a bag of them)
> but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.
Why? We know that premodern people often spent significant amounts of money/resources on things that were neither practical nor had any religious importance