Gold Plated 1/4 Stater Sunburst Little Horse / Dobunnic Abstract Type Contemporary Counterfeit

Contemporary counterfeits of Dobunnic quarter staters are well-documented and were produced close enough in time and place to the originals that they circulated freely alongside them. The gold-plated bronze construction — a bronze flan with a thin wash of gold — was not crude deception by modern standards; in a pre-assay economy where coin value was partly fiduciary, such pieces passed without systematic challenge. The Dobunni, operating across what is now Gloucestershire and surrounding areas, never developed a centralised mint infrastructure, which created the tolerance for weight and composition variation that made imitation viable in the first place.