Conveners
S58. LATE ANTIQUITY AND EARLY MIDDLE AGES 3. FLAME, DIGITAL NUMISMATICS, AND THE LATE ANTIQUE-MEDIEVAL TRANS
- Mark Pyzyk (Princeton University)
Description
Org. & chair: Mark Pyzyk
This panel showcases new research emerging out of Princeton University's Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy (FLAME) Project, an online database/web-interface focused on coin finds of the Late Antique and Early Medieval period (325–750 CE). Launched in May 2021, FLAME’s new Circulation Module makes available information on more than 700,000 coins (spread among 6,625 coin hoards and excavations) from 734 mints, ranging from Portugal to India. FLAME brings together more than 35 international scholars, each contributing region- and period-specific numismatic expertise.
The Late Antique to Early Medieval transition remains a major historical topic, critical to the emergence of the European economy of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. It is a period of change indeed - but of what kind, where and when? Recent syntheses have focused on regional variation and non-teleological accounts of economic change. However, numismatic evidence has not constituted a major body of evidence for this period, owing to the daunting nature of employing coinage as large-scale historical data. FLAME provides a standardized, significant, and growing body of evidence for the economic history of this period.
The papers in this panel use FLAME to illuminate historical problems, some macro-regional, some micro-regional, using FLAME to tie together and query previously scattered and heterogeneous evidence. In so doing, they better integrate traditional scholarly questions with innovative digital tools. The result is expected to help move economic scholarship on this period forward, showcasing methods and insights that we hope other scholars take up.
The study of Visigothic monetary circulation is one of the key issues in the field of Visigothic numismatics. The most complete work on the subject is almost half a century old and many things have changed since then; new hoards and isolated finds have entered the corpus of Visigothic coinage. Recently, partial studies on the Visigothic kingdom have used numismatic evidence to support theories...
This paper will focus on the monetary distribution in southern Italy in the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. Thanks to the information about discoveries of coins collected in FLAME, it was possible to amasss a large series of data deriving from excavations and single findings. In addition to the quantitative analyiss of individual emissions and their areas of origin, a distributional...
This study seeks to understand how the economic paradigm shift observed at the end of the Late Antiquity reshaped local economies. During the second half of the sixth century the region of the southern Balkans underwent many economic changes followed by a prolonged recession. This recession played a major role in the transformation of the urban centers, a process which differed by region. The...
The invasions of the Slavs, Avars, Antes, and Bulgars of the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire during the 6th and 7th centuries have been used to explainthe changes in coin circulation observed in the Northern Balkans in this period. The FLAME Project database represents a unique accumulation of mapped data that can be used to challenge some of the monocausal explanations offered in...
