Gold Plated Stater - Vosenos Dragon Contemporary Counterfeit

Contemporary counterfeits of Cantian staters — plated base-metal cores struck from genuine or copy dies — circulated alongside official issues with apparent regularity in the late first century BC, suggesting either that tribal authorities tolerated them or lacked the enforcement capacity to suppress them. The Vosenos type, attributed to a named ruler whose coinage spans a narrow window before the Claudian conquest made such issues obsolete, is already rare in genuine form. A plated survivor catalogued against BMC Iron Age 2513 rather than a primary reference number signals that this piece was recognised early as a fabricate, not a later forgery.