Speaker
Description
To understand the early stages of coinage I study the relation between building activities and the origins of minting. Already in 2000 Kenneth Sheedy concluded that there was a link between Parian coin production and building activities of the Parians. Was Paros an exception or was there a structural link between public building and coinage? To answer that question, the investigations conducted by the Copenhagen Polis Centre are invaluable. In the synthesis publication An inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Hansen and Nielsen 2004), a wealth of information about all 1,035 identified poleis was brought together. With these rich data I test whether there is a connection between minting and several types of buildings (city walls, political architecture and other public buildings including temples). My final aim is to demonstrate that coinage was used as a solution to tackle developments that took place in the late Greek archaic period.
