Why were ancient minters so bad at making round coins with the pattern in the middle?

Question

[Roman coins often look like total crap, why?](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*JEAj3t9m9nAwrsFLLTMAQw.jpeg)

In: Technology

Answer 1

In Mary Beard’s SPQR, there is a photo of a tomb (iirc), with Roman mint workers depicted on it. Essentially, a guy with a long set of tongs is pulling a heated disk of metal out of an oven. He then positions it over an anvil, and another guy slams it with a big hammer/die. Thats it. It wasn’t a very precise process. And as we know, millions of these things were churned out. I imagine most were considered “good enough”, and those that weren’t just got re-melted and reprocessed.