Compared with the showy and carefully selected silver and gold coins that typically represent Greek coinage inmost book illustrations and museum displays, coins recovered in archaeological excavations can be difficult to appreciate. By their very nature, excavation coins are unselected. Almost all are made of bronze, a metal that readily corrodes when buried in the ground. Apart from any damage by corrosion, many are heavily worn or broken. Because they were often lost and have been recovered in huge numbers, they can be extremely repetitive.