309 research outputs found
Aspects of Roman Republican coins found in Late Iron Age Dacia
I first met Virgil in 1992 during my first trip to Romania when I visited Iaşi and he and his family were kind enough to look after me. The following year I spent some six months studying at the Institute of Archaeology there
Where do we go from here? Recording and analysing Roman coins from archaeological excavations
The publication of English Heritage's guidelines for the analysis and publication of coins from excavations has not met with acceptance by the relevant specialists. This paper takes the opportunity to look back over what we have been doing, consider what the guidelines suggest, and makes recommendations as to where we could be going. In particular it argues that we should be making more of existing database technologies and the internet, and that the analysis of coins should be integrated with other aspects of the archaeological record. The paper is not a new set of guidelines, but is intended to stimulate debate
Multivariate Money: A statistical analysis of Roman Republican coin hoards with special reference to material from Romania
The aim of this thesis is assess the usefulness of the statistical analysis of coin hoards for the
examination of aspects of ancient societies including coin use and exchange. Special attention was
paid to various aspects of ‘formation processes.’ The thesis was divided into three parts.
Part I — Background. This Part initially reviews the history of the project and then goes
on to examine the concept of money in the light of anthropological and economic work. A brief
discussion of types of exchange (gift, barter, commodity exchange) in societies is offered. The Part
is concluded with a review of previous statistical analyses of coin assemblages.
Part II—Analysing Hoards A large database of Roman Republican coin hoards was collected
for this project. The problems with this type of data, its storage and retrieval are discussed. The
database is then analysed in great detail in order to answer a series of numismatic, archaeological
and statistical questions.
Correspondence analysis was used on twenty-two subsets of the data to reveal patterning in
the data-set which is discussed. A new variant of cluster analysis was developed to subdivide
the data set whilst minimising the time series element. The results are compared to principal coordinates
and detrended correspondence analyses. The analyses reveal aspects of the use and supply
of Roman coinage over Europe and show clearly the unique nature of the Romanian data.
An attempt is made to estimate the speed of circulation of coin in Italy. It is shown that the
nature of coin supply leads to variation between periods which is the result of simple probability
and sampling theory, not changes in the speed of circulation of coin as has been suggested by other
authors.
Simulation studies are used to examine the validity of estimates of coin production and annual
coin loss.
The results are summarised. The usefulness of the techniques used is discussed. In the light of
the formation processes examined, the patterns in coin hoard data are tentatively interpreted.
Part III — Romania. It is argued that to attempt a detailed interpretation of the patterns
revealed above the material must be seen in its archaeological context. This case study is offered as
one such attempt. Romania was chosen for two reasons: 1) the exceptional quantity of hoards found
in an area outside Roman control; 2) the unique evidence for the copying of coins. After reviewing
various aspects of Romanian archaeology, a detailed analysis of the problem of copies is offered
including the results of a large scale archaeometallurgical study conducted under the direction of
the author. Estimates of the quantities of coins copied are given. A brief review of the settlement
evidence in the counties of Sibiu, Alba and Hunedoara, of special settlement and structure types,
and of hoards of silverware is presented. The thesis concludes by discussing the nature of Dacian
society and its use of coin in the light of the theoretical discussions in Part I, the evidence for coin
supply discussed in Part II and the results of the analyses in Part III in the context of the wider
archaeological evidence
Mind the Gap! Roman Republican coin hoards from Italy and Iberia at the end of the second century BC
This paper has two aims. Firstly, it seeks to re-examine ‘the gap’ in depth and assess the strength and nature of the pattern, including which issues are associated with it. Secondly, it seeks to assess the impact on that pattern of the proposed re-dating of the issues from the end of the second century and the beginning of the first century BC by the late Harold Mattingly.10 In working to achieve these two principal aims, the paper also demonstrates both the advantages and limitations of multivariate statistical analysis of coin hoard data. To conclude, some possible explanations for the pattern are discussed
Simulation, Seriation and the Dating of Roman Republican Coins
Seriation was one of the earliest applications of computers to an archaeological problem. Despite the origins of the technique in numismatics, the vast majority of coinage studies manually sequence coin hoards and issues. For many periods, the coin designs or legends can be used to provide a date. For the Republican series, however, detailed sequences rely on the use of coin hoard data. In recent years, Correspondence Analysis has become the de facto seriation routine of choice. For coinage studies, however, where the period of manufacture was very short, a successful seriation would leave one triangle empty in the re-arranged matrix rather than concentrating the largest values on the diagonal as would be the aim in other situations. The aim of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of various easily-available off-the-shelf open-source seriation routines that have been used in archaeology for the analysis of this type of data. Given that we know a great deal about the pattern of production of Republican coinage, it is possible to create simulated coin hoard assemblages to test the various seriation routines and assess which technique is likely to provide the most successful results. This paper presents the results of applying 14 seriation methods to 27 simulated coin hoard data sets, and discusses the results
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