Resumen de Piesele de aur din depozitul Cugir I si relatia lor cu sistemele metrologice din Bronzul târziu
The presence of fragmentary objects in hoards has been widely debated and analysed.
Several explanations have been provided, ranging from ¿scrap metal¿, meant to be recycled and therefore kept close to workshops, to ritual decommissioning during ceremonies of mystical violence. Last but not least, they were also assigned a possible ¿monetary¿ value, in that they may have formed a weighing system. The impressive quantity of sickles omnipresent in hoards has mainly determined researchers to connect them to a pre-monetary system. But in order for such a pre-monetary system to work, it had to build upon a common weight base. Considerable efforts have been made to identify such a weight system over the past few decades. However, such attempts that started from weighing each individual fragment from bronze hoards have been only partly successful so far.
There are relatively few Romanian hoard studies of this kind, which have extended their consideration to the weight of artifacts, according to their category, and have focused mainly on fragments. Local researchers have mostly concentrated on typology and chronology.
The weight analysis of the gold ingot rings from the Cugir I hoard, which were intentionally fragmented, has provided us with surprising results. Of the 24 items, weighing a total of 287.23 grams, only eight (i.e. a third) are intact. The rest of them are cut at one or both ends, or even fashioned into small bars. Upon a simple visual analysis, the cutting marks made by a narrow blade chisel become obvious. In some cases, the same fragment was partially cut, only to be re-severed a few millimeters away, in order to obtain a piece of a specific size, or rather a desired weight.
According to their weight, the gold pieces from Cugir fall into two clear categories. The first group is that of items weighing between between 5.19 and 6.8 gr., for which an average weight would be approx. 6.14 +/- 0,5 gr. In the second category, the fragments have a weight between 12.77 and 13.47 grams, in which case (taking into account an error margin of approx. +/- 0.5 gr.) the standard weight is circa 13.0 +/- 0.5 gr. (i.e. double that of the first group). We could even point out a third group, which includes two smaller pieces weighing between 3.15 and 3.43 gr., half the weight of the first category. A parallel could be drawn between this hoard and others from Transylvania and Banat, which have fragmentary items of the same standards, just like in the case of the hoards from Sacosu Mare, Cauas and Hinova.
The rhombic section ring ingots from Cugir are part of a widely spread group of gold artifacts that have been found either in hoards or isolated throughout the Central and Western Transylvania, as well as Banat and North-Eastern Hungary, within a clearly delimited area. The weight analysis of the ring ingots from Cugir confirms and consolidates the results previously obtained in several reference studies of gold artifacts from Late Bronze hoards from Central and South-Eastern Europe.
