Yes and no. I respect the "they would have been recycled" argument, but, there would still be some. If you were good enough to cast a Dodecahedron, you are probably rich enough to keep your best one, to show off to all the new hipster kids.
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