Tetradrachm Wangenschnecke Type

The Wangenschnecke ("cheek-snail") types represent a late phase of Danubian Celtic silver coinage in which the original Macedonian tetradrachm prototype — absorbed through trade and mercenary contact with the Hellenistic world — had been so thoroughly abstracted over successive generations of local die-cutting that the source imagery became nearly unrecognizable. This particular branch of that degeneration is attributed to the Dacian populations of the Carpathian interior rather than to the more westerly Celtic groups, a distinction that matters for provenance but remains debated in the literature.

Göbl's sequencing places this variety relatively early within the Transylvanian series, before the most extreme stylistic dissolution.