Silver 5 Asses Turms series III: facing right, dots

Populonia was the only Etruscan city to strike its own coinage directly from locally smelted ore — the iron mines of Elba lay just offshore, and the smelting works at Populonia itself produced the metal that fed both industry and the mint. This silver issue belongs to the later phase of Populonian coinage, when the city was already in political and economic decline following Roman consolidation of the region. The "var." suffix on both Vecchi and HN Italy references indicates this specific dot arrangement has no precise parallel in either corpus — a genuine die variant rather than a cataloger's uncertainty.