ARGENTINA BUENOS AIRES 1 decimo 1823

Description

The Argentine War of Independence began in Buenos Aires and spread peacemeal to the provinces, some of which were briefly independent on their own. It took several decades for the country to get unified. During that time the governors of Buenos Aires had coins issued for use in the province.

There were humans living in Argentina in Paleolithic times. The hunter gatherer style of culture persisted into historical times. The Incas, with their centralized Imperial government, were beginning to expand into northern Argentina when the Spanish arrived and changed everything. They too were slow to develop the far south of South America. The Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata was only organized in 1776. It was said that silver was so common at one point that horseshoes were made from it. During the Independence War factions developed who continued to fight each other through several decades until the modern governmental scheme was inaugurated in 1861. Instability has remained a problem. There have been dictators, coups, episodes of hyperinflation. Argentinian governance problems have continued to be in the news in the third millennium.

In 1494, when Portugal and Spain were getting ready to seize land in the Western Hemisphere they asked the Pope to sort out the disagreements between them rather than fighting over everything. The Pope pointed to a longitude on a map and gave Portugal everything on one side and Spain everything on the other. Worked out well for Spain. Portugal got Brazil. Spain got everything else.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.