Self-Absorbed Dealers and the place of coin collecting in Historiography

The "professional numismatists" in the US seem to think that they can bamboozle us with empty claims. Perhaps airhead collectors are happy to accept what these people say as some kind of "fact", but there are more enquiring minds beyond coin fondling. We want to see these "facts' demonstrated. One of the least self-critical of these shopkeepers has attempted to dismiss an earlier post of mine. As part of what I assume he imagines is some kind of counter-argument he gaily announces that "numismatics is a primary source for the development of history", while other disciplines are not - but like Mr Berk declines to show that this is the case with state quarters. A bag full of California state quarters,  taken as an historical source. The floor is open for any collector or dealer to tell us about them, using only numismatic evidence. Put your money where your mouths are.

I trust there is no real need to demonstrate that the material culture, even in the form of a rubbish dump, interpreted using the applicable methodology, has an immeasurably greater deal to say about US society than discs of metal stamped with some pictures and the disjointed words "California," "John Muir," "Yosemite Valley" and "1850", meaningless without extra-source information. Just one small part of that material culture is the coinage (though in fact the less temporally-durable paper money is equally if not more significant culturally). Coincidentally James Dixon (Senior Archaeologist, Museum of London Archaeology, Planning,) has an interesting paper on this "Is the present day post-medieval?" - funnily enough, the words "coin" and "numismatics" seem to feature nowhere in it.