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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle. So the amount of these dodecahedrons indicate that there were a lot more in circulation at the time.

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.

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>Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle.

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.

Yes. Humans really liked burying things. Burying prized or expensive objects was pretty normal in human history. Layers of dirt only piled on with time. I don't think humans did much Archaeology pre-19th century. There are buckets of ancient coins. I leave this evidence of old metal laying around: "The Horses of Saint Mark, also known as Triumphal Quadriga, 2nd or 3rd century CE, via Basilica di San Marco, Venice"

But the very fact that people buried them proves how sought after they were.

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.

They were very sought after, but it was very common for folks to put their money in a sealed ceramic pot to protect and hide it, either buried under the floor of their home somewhere or outside in some secret spot. There were regular wars, plagues, invasions, and other civic chaos that left many of these hidden troves long buried until someone later found them. Ancient peoples buried a lot of metal artifacts for burials or rituals (the Celts buried a lot of weapons in their rites) that have been recovered as well. Lots of circumstances need to line up, but the ancient past had many very chaotic eras. With metal detectors large numbers of troves are being rediscovered.

> any metal they can sell as scrap

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

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