Pontika, point to other commercial travellers.^102 As I have argued above,
the mechanisms for ensuring the supply of any commodity meant that
every community had to look after its own interests. For periods after the
mid fourth centurybc, when Macedonian coins progressively became
available and widely disseminated, it becomes harder to connect specific
users and to map their activities spatially. Individual coins can, of course,
only be interpreted as indirect evidence for the movement of people. Yet,
as we have seen, we can detect in the countermarks on coins thefinancial
decisions of various authorities operating in the hinterland of Byzantion
during thefinal two centuriesbc, whether these were small civic entities
or princes.
Apart from the hemidrachms of the Chersonese, which succeeded a
not dissimilar, albeit less numerous, distribution of Cyzicene staters, one
of the pre-Macedonian coin types that enjoyed a particularly wide
outreach were the‘satyr and nymph’silver staters and drachmae of
Thasos, or imitations of them. Examples have been recovered not just
at sites in relative proximity to Thasos, but also from known, but
comparatively distant centres of exchange, such as Vardarski Rid, near
Gevgelija, FYROM, considered by its investigators to be one of the chief
centres of Paionian authority, and Krastevich, a Thracian settlement and
sanctuary in the foothills of the Sredna Gora, east of Strelcha.^103 Visual
and scientific analyses of selected coins show that some, perhaps many,
were not made on behalf of Thasians. Imitations could be copied to boost
the supply of particularly popular monetary media; they might also be
deliberate attempts to copy good coins using a different alloy. How
imitations should be evaluated as valid media of exchange depends on
whether rival issues were acceptable to different authorities. In modern
contexts, the deliberate falsification of coinage is treated as a criminal
offence, in order to discourage crime and to protect the monopolies of
issuing authorities; but a moderate level of falsification is tolerated, in the
case of coined money at least. At Athens the acceptance of false coins
masquerading as Athenian ones by the official responsible for verifying
coinage was a punishable offence, not least because of the well known
(^102) Taneva 2000; the range and number of coins have increased appreciably since this
publication, with the current total close to 2,000 coins, of which the hoard ofc. 280 – 78 bc
comprises 552. De Callataÿ’s table of published coins from excavations provides a broad
scale of comparison, with Athens at the top (12,676 coins). The combinedfigure for
Olynthos is 4,992 coins and Seuthopolis 1,305. Most published coin catalogues from
excavated Greek sites have produced less than 1,000. De Callataÿ discusses the variable
rate of survival over time (2006b, 179 103 – 91).
Cyzicene staters: Archibald 1998, 126–35, for distribution and further refs; Picard
2000 for Thasian types; Vardarski Rid: Husenovski 2002; for Krastevich, see above n.16.
234 Regionalism and regional economies