My theory is that they had no practical purpose, they were just a trendy knickknack that eventually fell out of fashion. A Roman equivalent of a fidget spinner or something.
In a few thousand years whatever has become of humanity will be digging up fidget spinners and wondering about them in the same way we do with dodecahedrons. It’s not as if anyone will have been preserving fidget spinner media for millennia to explain them.
Yeah it’s funny that’s never the conclusion but logically it makes sense to not dismiss something as unknown until we’re sure it wasn’t used for anything else. Still can’t wait for future civilizations to be very confused when they see my collection of funny looking coins.
Oftentimes, that’s a sort of inside joke. If it’s even remotely probe-shaped, they assume it was used for sex. But since that doesn’t look nice on academic papers, they’ll use “ritual” as a euphemism.
Seriously, archeologists find a lot of ancient dildos.
Gotta disagree, I bet they’re still finding great-great-great-[…]-grandmother’s dildos (or -grandfather’s, who knows?) and they hold up just fine, all things considered.
They do come to that conclusion all the time, but in some cases it’s impossible to know for sure. If they don’t know for sure then they’re not going to say it’s definitely for decoration only, but they’ll list it as an option, which they have done for this object.
I’m thinking coin sorter. You start by sorting the smallest coins through the littlest holes, and work your way up.
I’m a knitter, and making gloves with it just doesn’t compute for me. It’s too clumsy, with too many extra steps. They’d be making gloves from fabric or leather.
I like this idea because it fits with finding them in coin hoards and it seems practical - a simpler way for a merchant to check the value of coins without a scale and set of precision weights.
Ya know my dumbass mixed up coin sorter and coin holder. But that does present another idea, do you think you could slot a coin in between the little nubs? Basically an antiquaties version of those belt coin holders?
I don’t think so? If the diameter of the coin is wider than the gap between two nubs then you couldn’t fit it in. If it’s thinner than the gap, the coin wouldn’t stay in once it was between all three. That might make for a good puzzle idea but it would need some trick to work, like a detachable knob
Not really, look up nalbinding. That old way of knitting used one thumb and a needle instead of two needles. all those knobs could have been used in place of your left thumb.
Doesn’t that one also present a problem for the popular knitting theory? Aren’t the holes supposed to show the finger size or something? (I’m not positive, as a knitter this seems really unusual for knitting).
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