In The Numismatic Chronicle of 2019, some of us published a comparative isotopic analysis of a number of lead pieces from Minturnae in Italy and the grandes plomos monetiformes from the area that became the province of Baetica under Augustus—which for simplicity we call ‘Baetica’—both of which use the Italo-Baetican iconography. This showed that in both cases lead from both the Sierra Cartagena/Mazzarón mines around Carthago Nova and the Sierra Morena mines in the interior was used, and in some cases mixed.
We suggested that Minturnaeans were among the first to exploit the riches of Hispania after the Second Punic War, in which the city seems to have played an important and until-now unappreciated role. They travelled and traded widely, with Massalia and south-western France and with Hispania Ulterior, as the Minturnaean lead pieces from a purse in the second-century Isla Pedrosa wreck off Estartit in Catalonia. The evidence of gentes known epigraphically from both Minturnae and Carthago Nova is clear.
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