They’ve got a lot of sentimental value to the original owners of those hoards. It actually makes more sense: master blacksmiths were far more likely to be wealthy enough to have coin hoards and considered the objects symbolic of the trade that made that wealth.

Symbolic of their trade is for me also a good explanation. Something like a guild symbol hanging on the front of their workshop.

Or perhaps they were playing dungeons and dragons and needed these multiple faced dice ;)

So it's like a dev who's made themselves some money, getting buried with their C64?

I might just ask them to bury me with a Commodore 64 now that you gave me the idea.

It would be a shame to waste a working one, but maybe I can build a replica?

A lot of folks in this thread are latching on to this theory and making speculations to support it.

As is tradition in archaeology.

It's the archaeologists saying, “Nobody knows for certain how the Romans used them,” and offering a variety of competing theories, while people on this thread are trying to finesse the facts to support the theory they like.

So saying, "archaeologists are doing it" is demonstrably untrue here.

>people on this thread are trying to finesse the facts to support the theory they like.

Explicitly so, given that the root of this thread is saying it is a theory that they 'like', not that they think is objective truth.

The original commenter was explicit that they liked the theory, not that they were willing to make things up to support it. Those are two completely different things.

There are plenty of academic papers written by historians and archaeologists speculating about Roman dodecahedrons. That's where most of these ideas are coming from.

You just won't find them in HN comments for obvious reasons.

I didn't say they are merely speculating; that's a pretty normal thing to do. I said they are "latching on to this theory and making speculations to support it." In other words, they are starting with the conclusion, and making guesses to support that conclusion.

You incorrectly stated that's a tradition in archaeology, as if that would make any difference. It's not how theories are meant to be formed from evidence, regardless of whether or not you think it's a tradition in archaeology (which it isn't.)

it could be coincidence, since people with metal detectors looking for coins find them. there could perhaps be more, but not where coin searching with metal detectors is common?