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Modern people aren't the only ones who've polluted the atmosphere. Two thousand years ago, the Romans smelted precious ores in clay furnaces, extracting silver and belching lead into the sky. Some of that lead settled on Greenland's icecap and mixed in with ever-accumulating layers of ice. Now, scientists studying annual deposits of those ice layers have found that spikes and dips in lead pollution during the Roman era mirror the timing of many historical events, including wars fought by Julius Caesar.
=> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/rise-and-fall-roman-empire-exposed-greenland-ice-samples
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Rise and Fall of Roman Empire Exposed in Greenland Ice Samples
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Tuesday May 15 2018, @03:05PM
The stereotype is the romans were the only civilized people on the planet at the time and everyone else was a barbarian scarcely more civilized than a zombie, but reality is the locals had some significant civilization going on, and the Romans had a rough time in Europe in general while playing factions off against each other, such that neighbor civilization A paying tribute to neighbor civilization B using freshly mined silver likely had little interaction with Roman coin production. Also re-melting and re-minting coins was a "thing" back in the day, although kinda rare now a days. Finally the economic pattern was way more complex than they were savages, then they were productive roman citizens, then they were savages again, so the exact interaction with roughly equal locals was always kinda complicated.
Another oddity with respect to worldwide silver mining is there were more silver mines in the world than merely Roman, so perhaps the Persians or proto-Mayans or someone else were up to some foolishness while creating a lead contaminated EPA superfund site that had nothing to do with Romans. Romans admittedly were big time miners, but the rest of the world mined stuff occasionally also.
Both the bad part, and the good part, of paying tribute or protection money or taxes using bars of silver is some coins can't fall into the right/wrong hands along the way, a giant crate full of silver coins vs precisely 40 standard size bars of silver. I haven't read much on the ratio of bar to coin production by the mints.