Two new coins released by the Royal Australian Mint celebrate Indigenous astronomers, who have used the stars to map changing seasons, inform the behaviours of plants and animals, and encode Law.
Coins have always conveyed a message and, helpfully for historians, they are anchored to a specific time and space. Rome’s emperors used coins to push their political agendas.
Philip Pullman thinks this coin needs another comma. What do you think?
HM Treasury/PA
Currency first hit the scene thousands of years ago. An anthropologist explains the early origins and uses of money – and how archaeological finds fill in our picture of the past.