Silver 1 As Male head series I: facing left

Populonia stands as one of the few Etruscan cities known to have struck its own coinage directly from locally smelted metal — the ore coming from the iron-rich deposits of Elba and the Campigliese mainland. This silver as belongs to an early phase of Populonian minting when the denomination system was still being calibrated, with the as unit subdivided on a decimal rather than the Roman libral standard. The "var." designation against Vecchi-III#10 signals a die variant not fully catalogued in the main sequence.