<story><title>Rare 2,100-year-old gold coin bears name of obscure ruler from pre-Roman Britain</title><url>https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/rare-2100-year-old-gold-coin-bears-name-of-obscure-ruler-from-pre-roman-britain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jphoward</author><text>One thing I always wonder is how did all these countries manage to find enough gold to run an (albeit tiny) economy off them?  I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of&amp;#x2F;seen a gold mine in the UK, and yet 2000 years ago they were mining enough to mint currency.  Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out,  and now all gone?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weatherlight</author><text>Phenomenal book that cover&amp;#x27;s this exact topic, &amp;quot;Debt: The First 5000 Years.&amp;quot;
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Debt:_The_First_5000_Years&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Debt:_The_First_5000_Years&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;quot;The book argues that debt has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It would make sense that cash would pop up once the Romans arrived, and would be in small amounts to facilitate spot transactions between Romans and the pre-Roman peoples of Britain and why there&amp;#x27;s such little amounts of cash.&lt;p&gt;Further more, I can imagine a scenario where Roman coins were melted down to make these coins (total conjecture) .</text></comment>
<story><title>Rare 2,100-year-old gold coin bears name of obscure ruler from pre-Roman Britain</title><url>https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/rare-2100-year-old-gold-coin-bears-name-of-obscure-ruler-from-pre-roman-britain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jphoward</author><text>One thing I always wonder is how did all these countries manage to find enough gold to run an (albeit tiny) economy off them?  I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of&amp;#x2F;seen a gold mine in the UK, and yet 2000 years ago they were mining enough to mint currency.  Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out,  and now all gone?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>netbioserror</author><text>As early as the Bronze Age, Britain was part of wide-spanning trade networks that funneled Cornwallish tin to the empires of the Near East. I would imagine that even before the invention of true coinage, various quantities of gold and other precious metals were circulating in Britain from those Mediterranean sources.</text></comment>