Conveners
S34. CELTIC COINS 3. CELTIC NUMISMATICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
- David Wigg-Wolf (Römisch-Germansiche Kommission)
- Katherine Gruel (Aoroc _CNRS- ENS-PSL)
S34. CELTIC COINS 3. CELTIC NUMISMATICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
- David Wigg-Wolf (Römisch-Germansiche Kommission)
- Katherine Gruel (Aoroc _CNRS- ENS-PSL)
Description
Org.: David Wigg-Wolf, Sylvia Nieto-Pelletier, chair: David Wigg-Wolf, Katherine Gruel
Within the context of the Digital Turn, Celtic coins present a number of distinct challenges, but at the same time also chances. In contrast to many other ancient coinages, for example Hellenistic or Roman, for which structures of production are clearly recognisable and standardized typologies have been developed and published, Celtic issues still remain to some extent a “chaos impénétrable” (Colbert de Beaulieu). We often know very little about the actual infrastructures behind conception, production and issue, who was the active issuing authority, whether there were permanently established mints or instead coins were produced on an ad hoc basis, perhaps by travelling moneyers. The when and where of production are also often difficult to determine closely. A further characteristic of many coins series is a gradual development of the iconography, rather than clear transitions between distinguishable types, resulting in typologies that are often essentially subjective attempts to impose a structure on what is in reality more a fluid mass.
The session will concentrate on two aspects of how these distinctive characteristics of Celtic coins shape digital projects.
Four papers will address the challenges faced by databases in structuring data on what are often seemingly unstructured coinages. A particular focus will be on the role and application thereby of Linked Open Data.
However, the fluidity of the iconography and the resulting variety of individual coins also means that they provide an ideal testing ground for the employment of digital methods such as image recognition and machine learning. A further four papers will thus present digital projects addressing the development of typologies and automated die studies.
The hoard of Le Câtillon II found in 2012 in Jersey contains almost 70,000 Celtic coins. It took enormous manpower and time (including 25 volunteers) taking apart the hoard, generating pictures and also to do a first identification of each single coin. Currently, die studies are still ongoing and it would probably take another several decades to finish them based on the eyes of an expert...
The fine 3D digitalisation (to 1/10 of a micron) of coins leads to a wide variety of uses both in terms of research and the enhancement of collections. Our work aimed first of all to provide a dataset to identify dies by "deep learning". The 3D process erases colours and shading, and brings out details that have almost been erased. Then, from several pieces, a more complete picture of the dies...
To cluster thousands of coins, automatic methods are necessary. Public datasets for coin die clustering evaluation are too rare, despite their importance for the development of new methods using Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, with our dataset of 2070 3D scans of coins, we create two benchmarks, one for point cloud registration, essential for coin die recognition, and a benchmark of coin...
The 16 kg hoard of Padanian drachmas was discovered at Manerbio in 1955. Its size is exceptional, its composition remarkable: the deposit is divided into three series, attributed to three Cisalpine peoples: the Cenomans, the Insubres and the Libui (?) (ARSLAN 2017). Recent metal analyses established that these three series of coins were minted from the same silver stock. This unusual...
Developed with FileMaker Pro, our "Antic monetary facies" database contains 40,000 records. Its transformation into a collaborative web tool entails a reorganization of the structure by distinguishing between data files, which can be made available at a later date, and the descriptive thesaurus under Opentheso (a web-based thesaurus management tool dedicated to the management of vocabularies),...
Recent years have seen the successful online publication of a number of virtual union catalogues for coinages from different fields of numismatics, for example Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) and PELLA. However, the development of such a resource for the coinage of pre-Roman Iron Age Europe presents a number of new challenges. Thus, there is no single universal standard reference work...
The Iron Age was the period in which the first coins appeared in Britain, and they are a major source of information on late Iron Age society. The main dataset of this material culture is the Celtic Coin Index (CCI), housed at the University of Oxford. Up to now, it has existed mainly on paper index cards (more than 80,000). This talk introduces the Celtic Coin Index Digital (CCID) project...
Thanks to the Aureus and Atmoce projects funded by the French Région Centre-Val de Loire, a metal analysis database for ancient coins, especially Celtic coins, was recently developed at the IRAMAT laboratory in close partnership with the MSH Val de Loire.
Interoperable, in particular with the Gallica database (BnF), the AeMa database will make available to the scientific community the results...
