Ian Morris, Death-ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 106, noting in his skeptical discussion of "Who Pays the Ferryman?" that "coins may have paid the ferryman, but that is not all that they did." See also Keld Grinder-Hansen, "Charon’s Fee in Ancient Greece?" Acta Hyperborea 3 (1991), p. 215, who goes so far as to assert that "there is very little evidence in favour of a connection between the Charon myth and the death-coin practice," but the point is primarily that the term "Charon’s obol" belongs to the discourse of myth and literature rather than the discipline of archaeology.
