Gold Plated Stater - Vepo Star Contemporary Counterfeit

Contemporary counterfeits of Iron Age coinage are genuinely difficult to classify — these weren't produced centuries later by collectors or dealers, but circulated alongside legitimate issues, almost certainly with the knowledge of local communities. The Corieltauvi operated across the East Midlands without a centralised mint in the Roman sense, and the loose tribal authority over coin production likely made gold-plated base-metal forgeries easier to introduce and harder to police. Whether this piece entered circulation through opportunism or some sanctioned local economy of debased exchange is an open question the metallurgy alone cannot answer.