Lots of artifacts have survived that were made of metal that didn’t get recycled and didn’t serve a practical purpose. After coinage, the most common metal artifacts from that time period are simple pendants and jewelry. Most of them made from iron and bronze rather than precious metals.

They wouldn't be recycled if they were also used as a credential for quality of work. If you're a metal worker who wants to migrate to a new town, and wants to work at my forge, how do I know you can do quality work? Sure, these could be stolen but I'm assuming a master metal worker knows the right questions to ask to verify it's legitimate.

I don't think ancient roman society worked that way. Traveling is expensive first of all, carrying stuff if even more expensive. You carry what you need, not metal trinkets.

And also your reputation is based mostly on word of mouth. That's how it still works in rural societies today.

If there were any such certification for metalurgists it would have been a small one like a ring or a bracelet.

Ancient Roman society was not Medieval Europe, there was very little serfdom, especially among those with any skill whatsoever, so plenty of people moved from place to place, likely dozens or hundreds of times in their lives.

There were plenty of captured slaves from conquered peoples, but skilled metalworkers would hardly belong to that group.

The vast majority of people would never have willingly traveled far from their birthplace, in medieval Europe or the Roman Empire. This is especially true for those who had few skills. You could do basic labor in your own village, but how could you leave without any money or support network (e.g., a family)? Why would people trust you elsewhere? The dynamic was probably different in larger cities, of which there were more in Roman times compared to the (at least early) medieval period though.

This had little to do with serfdom, and practices that would fit under what we might call serfdom were extremely varied from time and place. It would have been very rare for someone to have the means, ability, and desire to move far from their home yet couldn't because they were somehow legally bound to land owned by a lord (who only had power over that one area anyhow).

The speculation is that there were created by advanced apprentices. What we’d now call “journeymen.” Most people didn’t move around maybe, but I wouldn’t be that surprised to find that they did.

They absolutely would have moved around since one of the most common ways to get those apprenticeships was to sign up to help with an army that was mobilizing for war. Militaries needed a lot of blacksmiths to tag along as support and they needed a lot of apprentices for manual labor. When they came back from, they often had a little more choice in where to go back to so they had quite a bit more mobility over all.

Not just that, but "head out with the military, stay where you end up (or somewhere along the route)" is a tried-and-true method of moving people throughout history. How else would you end up with Latin dialects spoken over a range from Portugal to the Black Sea?

> How else would you end up with Latin dialects spoken over a range from Portugal to the Black Sea?

Same way we ended with almost everyone in Ireland speaking English as their main language?

violent conquest, followed by a brutal subjugation and a cultural genocide.

Sure, but also (and corollary to the first three) "leaving people behind in power who speak English".

People definitely travelled. For business, religion, and pleasure.

There wouldn't be such extensive roads if they didn't.

Sure, but for the vast majority of workers and artisans they would most likely do a pilgrimage. And we have found tons of little charms, even penises, but they are all much smaller than any of the dodecahedrons.

Travel with luggage is what I was referring to as rare for most people.

Isn’t long distance “pilgrimage” more of a Christian thing and it didn’t really become that widespread until the 300s or 400s?

They sure are.

During roman period most likely people traveled for festivals.

Archaeologists have found what could be temporarily built up areas for festivals. And it is known that festivals were a big thing that gave the population a break from work.

Which is what I personally would like to connect with the famous penis pendants, but nobody knows for sure. They could just be fertility symbols related to courtship and marriage.

FYI I'm doing a lot of guessing here, which is apt when it comes to discussing dodecahedrons. In my opinion you can look at contemporary, or near contemporary, rural communities and see a lot of similarities with ancient society.

People travelled, but regular people didn't routinely travel to the other side of the empire. The road network was probably used more for "local travel" than "far travel".

The roads were mainly for the army though. And water travel was almost always preferable when traveling long distances (the cost of shipping for goods was a magnitude or more lower).

> there was very little serfdom

Serfdom (or a comparable system) and other strong legal limitations on social mobility were certainly a thing in the 300s.

> so plenty of people moved from place to place, likely dozens or hundreds of times in their lives.

I’m not sure how is it particularly different from medieval Europe in that way?

But there are other reasons why traveling and moving to different regions was relatively rare for most people (e.g. almost everyone was extremely reliant on their local social networks, so moving to a different community was very costly). Of course metalworkers and other highly skilled craftsmen were probably always one of the most mobile groups (in pre-Roman times and during the middle ages as well)

You're right that the master metal worker should be able to sniff out a fraud, but then what role does the dodecahedron play? It would be like me applying to a programming job by showing up with a ZIP file of some code I'd written in the past, which of course I promise I didn't steal from a better programmer. You'd probably give it very little credence compared to either personal references or work done in front of you.

If your dodecahedron were essentially your “resume”, you’d go out of your way to keep it safe from thieves. Besides, stealing one wouldn’t do you much good, as you’d be discovered as a fraud pretty quickly based on the quality of your work.

Having one of these in your possession would be enough to get you in the door, as well as giving your potential employer a quick and easy way to judge the quality of your work. The alternative would be to require a prospective employee to make a dodecahedron in front of you, which doesn’t really provide all that much of a benefit in the long term.

I don't see anything about the dodecahedrons being signed or stamped or branded in any way, so I can't buy them being a resume. Seems like if it were your personal proof of employability, and you cared a lot about it not being stolen, the first thing you'd put some mark on it to indicate it was yours. And then there's the fact that some of them have been found buried in coin hoards, which doesn't make sense (why would you collect a craftsman's portfolio piece and store it with your treasure?).

> found buried in coin hoards

Has anyone ever tried matching the sizes/circumferences of the coins with the holes?

Could have been used as a auto-coin sorting device?

> It would be like me applying to a programming job by showing up with a ZIP file of some code I'd written in the past

This is pretty much how it worked pre-internet

There are numerous tokens that people hold on to even to this day, especially if it's a token symbolizing 'coming of age'.

They're small enough that I can imagine people holding onto them. The hollow construction also reduces the quantity of metal used. And it's possible that we find other training pieces but don't recognize them as such, because the other ones could have practical uses.

Yes and no. I respect the "they would have been recycled" argument, but, there would still be some. If you were good enough to cast a Dodecahedron, you are probably rich enough to keep your best one, to show off to all the new hipster kids.

Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle. So the amount of these dodecahedrons indicate that there were a lot more in circulation at the time.

2000 years of poor and homeless people looking for any metal they can sell as scrap.

That's why I don't buy the apprentice argument that always pops up in these discussions.

In this case you'd be excused for saying it's some sort of ritualistic object. Because rituals are important in people's lives, important enough to create and carry around metal and stone objects with you. And rituals pervade all of society.

I don't claim to know what it is, but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.

>Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle.

That's not really true. There's regular finds of hoards of thousands of ancient coins that are in excellent condition, esp. Roman coins. You'll find there's an actually quite a large number of ancient metal artifacts archaeologists have discovered if you look into it. Certainly the preservation rate is very low since people tend to guard metal objects and recycle them, but things happen, today archaeologists estimate there's something in the order of 10-30 millions of Roman coins that have been recovered in museum collections and held by private owners.

This depends on the metal, of course, iron preserves poorly as does bronze, so those are rare, but gold preserves extremely well, and silver better than bronze, esp. in drier conditions.

Yes. Humans really liked burying things. Burying prized or expensive objects was pretty normal in human history. Layers of dirt only piled on with time. I don't think humans did much Archaeology pre-19th century. There are buckets of ancient coins. I leave this evidence of old metal laying around: "The Horses of Saint Mark, also known as Triumphal Quadriga, 2nd or 3rd century CE, via Basilica di San Marco, Venice"

But the very fact that people buried them proves how sought after they were.

And of course if something is buried, and everyone involved dies before retrieving it, then it survives. But a lot of circumstances have to line up for that to happen.

They were very sought after, but it was very common for folks to put their money in a sealed ceramic pot to protect and hide it, either buried under the floor of their home somewhere or outside in some secret spot. There were regular wars, plagues, invasions, and other civic chaos that left many of these hidden troves long buried until someone later found them. Ancient peoples buried a lot of metal artifacts for burials or rituals (the Celts buried a lot of weapons in their rites) that have been recovered as well. Lots of circumstances need to line up, but the ancient past had many very chaotic eras. With metal detectors large numbers of troves are being rediscovered.

> any metal they can sell as scrap

We’re talking about tiny pieces of copper, though. Would it really have been that expensive to be worth the trouble (unless you had a bag of them)

> but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.

Why? We know that premodern people often spent significant amounts of money/resources on things that were neither practical nor had any religious importance