Silver Stater 'Durotrigan E'

The Durotriges occupied the southwestern corner of Britain — roughly modern Dorset and Somerset — and their coinage tells a story of deliberate isolation. While neighboring tribes maintained trade contacts with Gaul and adopted increasingly refined coin designs in response, the Durotriges moved in the opposite direction, progressively debasing their silver and abstracting their designs to near-illegibility. The period this piece covers, 58–45 BC, coincides almost exactly with Caesar's Gallic campaigns, which disrupted cross-Channel trade networks that British tribes had relied upon for generations.

By the terminal issues of this series, billon content had dropped so severely that some specimens are classified as bronze with silver wash.