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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3557498, member: 93416&quot;]Looks like this thread ran out of steam, but its a convenient place to maybe broaden out the discussion a little, with regard to this and other threads?</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1928 Mattingly saw all the Roman Imperial silver debasements, from Nero onwards, as a series of linked failures of Governmental tax policies, culminating in a kind of state bankruptcy under Gallienus – a “disastrous crash”…... “evil” ….for….. “the hard working citizen”.</p><p><br /></p><p>He went on to explain the huge hoards of base ants we find as being a consequence of that matter – (pointing to Aurelian’s refusal to accept old coin at parity) :</p><p><br /></p><p>“Many owners, sooner than part with their money at unfavourable rates, hoarded it in the ground”&nbsp; (Roman Coins, p. 186).&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I suspect Mattingly was in the right ballpark.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since about 2000, archaeologists have been stepping into the driving seat of numismatic interpretation, and, it seems to me, have been getting it increasingly wrong. It became fashionable first to argue that the huge hoards were “worthless”. (Surely false, even if treated as copper?). Later, at the BM, driven by Moorhead, backed by Bland, that the hoarding activity was “ritual”.</p><p><br /></p><p>for criticism of that see the thread:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.cointalk.com/threads/where-frome.322173/" class="internalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.cointalk.com/threads/where-frome.322173/">https://www.cointalk.com/threads/where-frome.322173/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>At a meet about 7 years back time, it was announced that the BM/PAS people had won a 600K grant to look into later 3rd century British hoarding. Does anyone know how that research is progressing? A quick web search did not throw up any results at all....................</p><p><br /></p><p>However, at that same meet, Nick Mayhew announced that a kind of rival research program was being launched under Howgego, at Oxford, looking at all Roman hoarding activity Empire wide. Interestingly that was privately funded by a coin collector. That work seems to be still chugging forward.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>(funded by Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza via the Augustus Foundation)</p><p><br /></p><p>Seems a lot of work is being done via Oxford in collecting data. And elsewhere Howgego seemed to take sensible stances on coin interpretation. However, in a quick search, I can only find little interpretative work stemming from the Oxford project, and nothing to counter the misguided fashion, as I would see it, of pointing to imagined ancient “rituals”.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone know more than I on these developments?</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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