Conveners
S86. DIE STUDIES 1. 21ST CENTURY APPROACHES TO DIE STUDIES
- Lucia Carbone (American Numismatic Society)
S86. DIE STUDIES 1. 21ST CENTURY APPROACHES TO DIE STUDIES
- Lucia Carbone (American Numismatic Society)
Description
Org.: Lucia Carbone, Liv M. Yarrow, Caroline Carrier; chair Lucia Carbone
Since its inception over 150 years ago, die studies have become an essential part of the numismatists’ tool kit because they aid in two major ways: (A) to reconstruct striking processes at a mint, and (B) to quantify the number of dies used to strike an issue. The first is widely accepted; the latter remains partly controversial. Even those who accept that quantification is possible and useful bemoan the fact that die studies are so laborious that it would be impossible to complete enough die studies of large enough issues to say anything particularly meaningful about the ancient money supply, let alone the ancient economy. However, new technologies seem to provide new possibilities. While no computer-aided die study has been published yet, using machine vision or computer aided measurement akin to facial recognition to speed the die study process seems now within reach, as in the case of ANS-sponsored CADS. Cooperative approach and open access databases provide yet other possibilities. Indeed, over the last few years, three projects have aimed to put online die studies: the Roman Republican Die Project (ANS), the SILVER project for the Greek coins including the Roman period (ENS Lyon) and the Iron Age Coin in Britain (Oxford). The data of thousands of die studies will be made available online for the first time and this resource will grow with new publications. It is a new important step for numismatics and one that will open new research paths to ancient economy studies based on these big data and on interdisciplinary approach. This panel thus aims to explore these new approaches to die studies, showing in which way it could be possible –paraphrasing M. Crawford – to solve “the practical problem that counting all the dies used to strike would be the work of several lifetimes.” (M.H. Crawford, RRC, 641).
Numismatic die studies are notoriously labor intensive to conduct by hand, and often take years to complete. Recent years have seen an uptick in computational approaches to die studies, taking advantage of computer vision and unsupervised clustering techniques to both improve accuracy and greatly reduce time required. This paper presents recent developments in the Computer-Aided Die Study...
In early 2019 the American Numismatic Society partnered Richard Schaefer in the Roman Republican Die Project, aiming at making available to the public his archive of over 300,000 pictures of Roman Republican Coinage, likely the largest die study ever undertaken. The first part of this project consisted of the digital preservation of Schaefer’s archive and was completed in June 2019. The second...
The Coinage of the Roman Republican Online (CRRO), a joint American Numismatic Society and British Museum collaboration, was published online in early 2015. This digital corpus, based on Michael Crawford's 1974 Roman Republic Coinage, has since drawn together more than 60,000 example specimens from dozens of collections. More recently, the information system on which CRRO lies has been...
This talk gives an overview of the online Greek die study database developed by the ERC “SILVER”. Based on the two "Recueils quantitatifs des émissions monétaires" by Fr. de Callataÿ (1997, 2003) whose different categories of data it reproduces, it expands the number of cases to more than 1000. The site allows for the interoperability with other websites, quantitative data for each series and...
The massive digitization of numismatic collections leads to questioning the role that an institution like the BnF can play in the digital numismatic world. In addition to the typological approach already developed on several linked open data portals, it is possible to consider the die as another way to gather/distinguish ancient coins issues. Thanks to several hundred thousand coins digitized,...
This paper will present the preliminary findings from the second phase of the Roman Republican Die Project, with data focused on the important historical period of 90 to 75 BCE. Findings from RRDP allow for updates to Crawford’s RRC from the addition of previously unobserved control marks to the revision of Crawford’s typologies. Most important, however, are the possibilities of quantification...
The proposed paper will present the results of a new regional study, which brings together the Late Classical and Hellenistic bronze coinages of five mints in the eastern foothills of Mount Ossa (Thessaly, Greece): Eureai, Eurymenai, Homolion, Meliboia and Rhizous. Combining a detailed die study with a close examination of the five mints’ topographic context, the paper not only works towards a...
From their founding in 1847, the Republic of Liberia vigorously sought to ensure both their political and financial independence from the imperial nations then asserting dominion over the African continent. To this end, the Republic struck a limited series of one and two cent copper pieces, dated 1847 and 1862, respectively. These were produced by William Taylor of London, who is perhaps...
