Conference – Crossing Frontiers: the Evidence of Roman Coin Hoards

“Crossing Frontiers: the Evidence of Roman Coin Hoards” will take place at All Souls College, Oxford on 21-22 April 2022.

This conference is organised by the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project (https://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk) and has been generously funded by the Augustus Foundation.

It will be organised as a hybrid event, and you can register for online participation here:

Roman coin hoards within and outside the Roman Empire have rarely been studied together. Doing so provides one way to test economic modelling within the Empire. For example, Hopkins’ important model of the Roman economy emphasizes the role of taxation in the movement of coinage. If that role was significant it ought to be possible to see from coin circulation where the Empire (or its effective taxation) ended. Also, the prevalence of recorded hoards on the frontier and their relative scarcity in central regions seem to speak to models of core and periphery. Frontier economies have themselves recently been the focus of study (OXREP conference: Frontier Economies in the Roman Empire). Can patterns of hoarding be used to characterise them? To what extent does the spread of Roman coinage beyond the ‘frontiers’ challenge a restricted definition of the Empire itself? How do patterns of coin hoarding within the Empire help us to interpret export and hoarding beyond the frontiers? For ancient writers the use of coin was characteristic of the Roman Empire but what can be said about the use of coin outside the Empire? To what extent can our knowledge of movement of coin outside the Empire be supplemented by proxies (imitations, bracteates, metallurgy)? Does a consideration of hoarding in later periods shed light on earlier practice?

Programme

THURSDAY 21 APRIL 2022
9:30am Welcome and introductory remarks
Andrew Wilson (Oxford) & Marguerite Spoerri Butcher (Oxford)
SESSION 1
Use and Deposition across the Roman World
Chair: Fleur Kemmers (Frankfurt a.M.)
10.00-10.40am Hoards and hoarding in North Africa
Antony Hostein (Paris) & Laurent Callegarin (Pau)
10.40-11.20am In-Out and Near. Patterns of hoarding in Pre-, During- and Post-Roman Dacia
Cristian Gazdac (Oxford/Cluj-Napoja)
11.40-12.20pm Ritual deposition of coins in Roman Gaul: chronology and patterns
Vincent Drost (Paris) & Ludovic Trommenschlager (Paris)
12.20-1pm Roman coin hoards from shipwrecks along the Eastern Mediterranean coast
Donald T. Ariel (Jerusalem)
SESSION 2
Use and deposition beyond the Roman world: North, Central, and Eastern Europe
Chair: Alek Bursche (Warsaw)
2.10-2.50pm Roman coin hoards from Denmark – an update
Helle W. Horsnæs (Copenhagen) & Rasmus H. Nielsen (Copenhagen)
2.50-3.30pm Visible and invisible coinage. Geochemical traces of Western European coinage in Scandinavia
Jane Kershaw (Oxford)
3.30-4.10pm Viking-Age dirham hoards in northern Europe: why so many?
Marek Jankowiak (Oxford)
4.40-5.20pm Hoarding the denarius. Thoughts about interactions between Gaul and the German Barbaricum
Jérémie Chameroy (Mainz) and Pierre-Marie Guihard (Caen)
5.20-6.00pm Coin hoards and hoarding in Eastern Barbaricum in Late Roman period
Kyrylo Myzgin (Schleswig/Warsaw)

FRIDAY 22 APRIL 2022
SESSION 3
The Roman East and Beyond
Chair: Eivind Heldaas Seland (Bergen)
9.30-10.10am Hoards of Roman coins from Ancient Armenia and their regional context
Anahide Kefelian (Oxford)
10.10-10.50am Karanis: hoard types from the site and a history of coin use
Irene Soto (Michigan)
11.20-12.00pm Hoards of Roman coins and imitations in India
Emilia Smagur (Warsaw)
12.00-12.40pm Roman and early Byzantine coins and imitations from Central Asia to China
Aleksandr Naymark (Hempstead, N.Y.)
SESSION 4
Challenging models and interpretations
Chair: Ben Hellings (Yale)
2.00-2.40pm The export of coin from the Roman Empire: some remarks on select literary sources
Bernhard Woytek (Vienna)
2.40-3.20pm Metallurgy as a proxy for the movement of coins
George Green (Oxford)
3.50-4.30pm Does the concept of a frontier make sense from the perspective of coin hoards?
David Wigg-Wolf (Frankfurt a.M.)

4.30-5.00pm Concluding remarks
Chris Howgego (Oxford)
5.00pm XVI International Numismatic Congress in Warsaw
Alek Bursche (Warsaw)