How plundered Gaulish silver ended up in Roman coins

AS BIGas their empire was, the Romans never reached Greenland. Yet that remote island has become for those interested in ancient economic history. Greenland’s ice sheets preserve traces of atmospheric lead emitted in Europe and north Africa as part of the silver-making process. Since silver coins were ubiquitous in antiquity, fluctuations in lead levels serve as a proxy for the ups and downs of the ancient money supply.Sometimes, though, such evidence throws up contradictions. In the final decades of the Roman Republic, war disrupted access to some of Rome’s biggest silver mines. Yet evidence from elsewhere suggests the minting of coins did not slow. In a paper published in Jonathan Wood, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool and his colleagues, offer an explanation. They suggest the Romans turned to recycling, of both their own silver, and—at the point of a —other people’s.