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Description
Circulation of coinage involves not only travel through space but also movement in time: coins enter circulation, then circulate for some longer or shorter amount of time, with greater or lesser intervals of immobility, and finally leave circulation. The amount of time that coins are in circulation is an essential factor determining the monetary supply of the economy. For the Visigothic kingdom of the early medieval Iberian Peninsula, the evidence of coinage is particularly important for studying the economy, since there are very few other types of information. This paper discusses the assumptions involved in modeling circulating lifetime and evaluates the possibilities relative to the limited hoard evidence available for the Visigothic kingdom. On this basis, some hypotheses about the temporal dimension of Visigothic circulation are proposed.
