Hoard of coins from Norman Conquest is Britain's most valuable treasure find
cnn.com
cnn.com
>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.
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?
good business.
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
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. :-(
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.
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'.
Yes, but they were available in the Middle Ages.
> And there are tomatoes in the special sauce.
OK, I didn't know that. They didn't have tomatoes in the European Middle Ages before contact with the New World was established.
But you can probably come reasonably close enough to a Big Mac knockoff with stuff they had available in the Middle Ages.
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.
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.
Eg nowadays almost everyone has the 'modern overbite', ie the top front teeth extend in front of the bottom front teeth.
See eg https://nextnature.org/en/magazine/story/2013/did-forks-real...
The article explicitly blames forks, but people in Song China had a modern overbite long before Europeans invented forks. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overbite#Changing_human_dentit... and https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/post/181554755777/deadcatwit...
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.
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.
"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.)"
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:
https://coins.ha.com/itm/ancients/greek/ancients-phoenicia-s...
Of course you can also get rare ones for $thousands or $millions. All about who cares and how many there are.
1 loaf of bread 1 obolos
The standard rate for a prostitute 3 oboloi
6 oboloi are 1 drahma, about 4 drahmai to the shekel. That coin is 1/16 shekel, so about 1.5 loaves
> 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.
Bearing in mind that I know nothing about ancient Greece and coins in equal parts.
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.
And by dig, I mean ask literally anything and listen to the half hour lecture.
Thanks!
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.
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.
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).
Some of the details here: https://detecthistory.com/metal-detecting/uk/
"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"
(Note "anywhere")
https://www.museum.ie/en-ie/collections-research/the-law-on-...
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.
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.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3661210/
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
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.