Posted by speckx 9 hours ago
Unfortunately bronze, with trimmed edges, common mint and worth very little. But if you tell me someone just stumbles onto and old coin in the street just lime that, I pretty much believe it.
I don't believe that they've been anywhere nearly as much of "a pain to spend" for you as you're stating. You're just gabbing.
(IIRC some businesses used to give change in $2 to show their "influence" on the area.)
Only time I ever got rare money was a buffalo / Indian head nickel as change in a cafe very recently, not a valuable form though.
I found a bill from the Weimar hyperinflation era. Its face value was several billion (Milliarden). Its only value was as a curiosity.
Per his Wikipedia:
"In 1874 Schliemann published Troy and Its Remains. Schliemann at first offered his collections, which included Priam's Gold, to the Greek government, then the French, and finally the Russians. In 1881, his collections ended up in Berlin, housed first in the Ethnographic Museum, and then the Museum for Pre- and Early History, until the start of WWII.
In 1939, all exhibits were packed and stored in the museum basement, then moved to the Prussian State Bank vault in January 1941. In 1941, the treasure was moved to the Flakturm located at the Berlin Zoological Garden, called the Zoo Tower. Dr. Wilhelm Unverzagt protected the three crates containing the Trojan gold when the Battle of Berlin commenced, right up until SMERSH forces took control of the tower on 1 May.
On 26 May 1945, Soviet forces, led by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Antipenko, Andre Konstantinov, deputy head of the Arts Committee, Viktor Lazarev, and Serafim Druzhinin, took the three crates away on trucks. The crates were then flown to Moscow on 30 June 1945, and taken to the Pushkin Museum ten days later. In 1994, the museum admitted the collection was in their possession."
Edit: this was also mentioned in the article
So "yes", then.
Young kings showing their piety by restoring old monuments was useful royal propaganda. This wasn't even the last time that the Sphinx was restored.
And the Neo-Babylonian Empire had the first tourism minister taking care of a paleo-Babylonian site.
Heck, Inuit had Chinese bronze artifacts [0] well before European contact (basically 4,000 miles).
[0] - https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2016/Q2/old...
I wouldn't jump immediately to modern collector, nor does the article.
Link should be updated to this.
It's the same reason paleontologists can go back to the same places every year and find new fossils, or farmers keep having to remove stones from their fields.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemucca_Lake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_mummy#Dating
For another example, most neighborhoods in eastern phoenix are built on top of old Hohokam villages, adjoining older basketmaker sites. The canals throughout the city often follow the old Hohokam canals. Fun fact, the Intel Chandler campus is on top of old hohokam suburbs of Pueblo de los muertos, which is buried under the modern suburbs.
It felt like a mix of rightful wariness due to untrustworthy opportunistic anthropologists from the 19th and 20th century along with taboos that developed due to some sort of collapse.
In the US you can find truly wild places, but it is pretty hard to find places untouched by man. Humans have been here for at least 15000 years, and from the very beginning were having huge impacts on the ecology.
There is also a district of the city that contains NIMBYs and other fossils, by a similar name.
(La Brea means "the tar").
A bit west of downtown, too, but I'm an annoying pedant.