Carinated ring money 32.186g, 40 mm

[Joe Sermarini]

Carinated ring money 32.186g, 40 mm. The sharp angles are unusual.  Has anyone seen this type?  I am concerned about authenticity.

[Joe Sermarini]

Nevermind.  I found similar in Victoor.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I can see many of these 'ring-money' at eBay,and my opinion is that it is not money.
I like to read about Celts,and i have not read anywhere anything about Celtic ring coins.Do you heard of any hoard of 'ring money'?
As we all know they loved horses,and those rings are simply-part of the horse gear.
I hunt a lot Celtic fields and every time i find at least one bronze ring.Sometimes linked with some other part of bronze.
Like those in my pictures.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Nevermind.  I found similar in Victoor.

I would like to read that book.Anybody have it in pdf?

[Joe Sermarini]

Do you heard of any hoard of 'ring money'?

Yes, they apparently are found in hoards. I think they were used as money. But I also think that anything bronze was nearly money.

[SC]

These carinated rings are common on Roman harness equipment.  It looks exactly like some I have.  One is posted in my gallery with three strap terminals still attached to it.

I agree with the idea that there is a fine line, especially in the Celtic era, between money and a valuable commodity like copper or bronze.  So whether a hoard of such items was a wealth / savings hoard, or a stock of valuable raw material for a smith or military figure is something we might never know.  Such items certainly had value.  Whether all could be said to be proto-money??

Shawn
 

[glebe]

I have recently been been looking at these Celtic rings/wheels/bells etc.
I got a lot of data from online sources (mainly Artimede sales of recent years, if I can mention them) and put it into spreadsheet.
The result was surprising - the weights of these things seem (and I emphasise seem) to be quantised, i.e, they seem to group about multiples of a basic unit weight of c. 3.7 gm. So far I have (tentatively) identified multiples of 1/2, 1 thru 6, 8, 12, 16, 24 and 40 units. The ring at the start of this thread fits nicely into the 8 unit group.
It is noticeable that this weight unit is statistically the same as the average weight of the Celtic arrowhead money types of 3.8 gm.
Whether this idea stands up over time remains to be seen, since, as is well known, humans have an inbuilt tendency to see order when there really isn't any. (There's a word for this but I have forgotten it for the moment*).
My immediate problem is that I haven't been able to devise a measure of the statistical reliability of the apparent groupings, through some sort of Chi-squared test for example, but I am looking into the problem.

Ross G.

* Update - the word is apophenia - see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

[Joe Sermarini]

You are not the first to notice this.  I have read at least a few times that they were made at set weights, but only that, without any details, and I don't remember where I read it.  Please post here anything else you learn.  I am very interested.  Thanks.