Celtic Ring Money, or Not

28.4 mm and 10.65 grams

Recently thousands of simple bronze rings, similar to this one, have been sold as Celtic ring money. While there is evidence for the Celts using metal rings as a form of money, all of the types that can be documented as probably money have fairly complex shapes, and not made of bronze. The true nature of these smooth rings is illustrated by the image below.

This is a hoard of bronze objects found together, which I purchased as a group in 2003 from a well known ebay seller of bronze objects from the Balkans. The object in the top center is an eastern Romano-Celtic bronze strap end, which defines the group as Roman period, possibly of Celtic workmanship (or at least inspired by Celtic design, and dates them to about the 1st or 2nd century AD. It is clear these rings are were junctions joining leather straps to other parts, to assemble a horse harness.

Many modern harnesses are still made this way, as you can see from this fitting on a modern skydiving harness. Horse harness are sometimes still sometimes made this way.

The bronze fittings seen attached these rings are a little unusual in that on many harnesses the leather straps would be attached directly to the rings, but this clearly illustrate how these rings were used. On harnesses with the leather straps tied to or woven through the rings, as on the sky diving harness, during burial all non-metal parts will decay away, leaving only the bronze rings in a cluster. A complex harness can have more than 20 rings, and someone finding a cluster of 20 bronze rings buried together with nothing else in the context, could easily conclude he had found a hoard of money items. But that conclusion would be incorrect.

Considering the role Horses and their harnesses played in the ancient and medieval world, one can only imagine how many millions of harness rings (or groups of rings) ended up buried in the ground. Consider that harnesses are sometiimes still being made this way, and have been for at least 3000 years, it is not generally possible to define the date or culture of a simple ring outside of it's burial context (or even in that context if all there is, is a cluster of rings). This is why the common practice of automatically calling them either Celtic, or ring money, is without merit.

It has been said that the fancy rings, with often multiple lugs on them, must then be the true ring money. But consider the size fancy multi-lugged rings that decorate the horse bit below.

Image used by permission of Windsor Antiques in New York.

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