Bronze Age Brexit: Britons did not use European weight standards for gold

[Duncan Head]

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2022/03/bronze-age-britons-did-not-use-european-weights-to-count-their-gold/143015

[DBS]

I have read the Antiquity article at speed, so may be doing it a disservice, but it seems to me there is a serious reasoning issue that is either overlooked, or inadequately explained: the difference between fragments and whole items.  A whole item, such as a torc or a brooch, is not going to be made to a standard size: its dimension and weight will be determined by purpose, customer (big, small, male, female) and availability of raw material.  You are not going to make a torc as a unit of trading currency, as opposed to an elite gift, which is a different concept, even if it serves a broadly similar purpose.  Breaking a precious object into fragments may be to serve as proto currency, so there would be a greater expectation of very crude equivalency perhaps being of service.  The problem with the paper is that it is not clear whether the intact apples are being compared to the fragmented oranges...

Also, the comparison with Bronze Age trading perhaps misses the point that, in the clearest evidence we have of precious metal as a proto currency, the Old Assyrian merchant tablets, both the metal and the textiles involved in the trade are defined by net weight, not how the weight is made up from individual items.  In which case, the weight of individual fragments or whole items becomes irrelevant - as long as I get one and a half mina of metal, I don't care whether that is made up of twenty standardised fragments, or thirty odds and ends.

As I say, I may be being unkind, and that my criticisms are too harsh, but not convinced at the moment!

[Duncan Head]

I have read the Antiquity article at speed, so may be doing it a disservice, but it seems to me there is a serious reasoning issue that is either overlooked, or inadequately explained: the difference between fragments and whole items.  A whole item, such as a torc or a brooch, is not going to be made to a standard size

Your disagreement appears to be not with the current Antiquity article, so much as with some of the earlier studies that it references. One of the referenced articles (Rahmstorf 2019) seems to suggest precisely the use of standard sizes - or rather, standard weights. Of bar torcs and dress fasteners from Atlantic Europe (not fragments), it concludes:

The statistical tests reject the null hypothesis, and we can conclude that the analysed gold finds were probably structured according to one quantum, or several quanta: they were produced with a carefully measured amount of gold.

That is what the new article seems to me to be arguing against, at least for the British finds.

[DBS]

Fair enough - as I say, I probably read it in too much haste, and probably also initially skewed by the initial write-up.