Today on eBay

Today (Sunday evening) on eBay.uk, as I have just counted, there are  429 lots being sold by UK dealers of Roman coins, of these 71 lots are bulk listings of uncleaned coins, each over ten coins - which would bring the number of coins on sale today as over a thousand. Some listed as "Roman" are not, they are fakes or misdescribed coins (many of them from India - export of such items is currently prohibited by Indian law). Some are clearly bulk lots from the Balkans being passed off as local finds (export of these too is prohibited without export licences by all countries in the region - have the sellers got any?). There are a couple of suspicious looking gold coins which may be from my region of the world laundered as being British finds (at least one of them, if its not a modern fake looks to be a Barbarian imitation)...  Not all of the coins on offer today will sell this week or month, but it's a fair bet that by the end of the year most of them (the real ones) will have gone to personal collections scattered across the world. I mention this because the (2011) study of Philippa Walton which I am reading today she proudly announces is based on an assemblage of 57,993 coins gathered over a decade, so probably about as many UK-metal-detected coins as pass through the hands of online UK dealers in less than a year - very few of which are recorded anywhere at all.

Vignette: Among the loot one can find on eBay.