'The Metallurgy of Roman Silver Coinage'

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by David Atherton, Nov 24, 2015.

  1. David Atherton

    David Atherton Flavian Fanatic

    I recently acquired The Metallurgy of Roman Silver Coinage: From the Reform of Nero to the Reform of Trajan by Kevin Butcher and Matthew Ponting. This is a tremendous tome which goes into great detail about the silver issues of the late first century. With over 800 pages to digest it is not a 'light' read!

    All of the major issues, both imperial and provincial, are discussed. There is so much more here than just the metallurgy of the coinage. It's almost a whole new interpretation of imperial finances. Building upon the pioneering work of David Walker, the authors show that the imperial coinage was much more complicated than we ever thought possible. It's not the story of a slow decline as previously conjectured. A tremendous and ground breaking work!

    The book is indeed expensive, but well worth it. Forego a coin if you must, you won't be disappointed.

    butcher ponting.jpg

    And in no way did the fact I have an obverse die match with the cover coin influence my praise of this work. ;)

    RPC1937asm.jpg
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 24, 2015
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  3. chrsmat71

    chrsmat71 I LIKE TURTLES!

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  4. Sallent

    Sallent Live long and prosper

    I may have to get this book.

    You can go to his website at his university and read a condensed summary of his research.

    http://sace.liv.ac.uk/romansilver/home/

    I think there is also a PDF version of the information on the book which the author put out a while back. I have it saved somewhere, but I don't remember where now. I'll have to look it up.
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2015
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  5. David Atherton

    David Atherton Flavian Fanatic

    I highly recommend you do. So much information is crammed into this complex book. For instance, there is a whole chapter devoted to flan production!

    The authors have been researching this subject since the mid '90s and over the years have published many individual papers on various topics covered in the work, a few of which are available online. Also, they recently received a grant to continue their research into the 2nd and 3rd century coinage. Hopefully this volume is just the first in a series.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 25, 2015
  6. TIF

    TIF Always learning.

    Wow, that does sound interesting!
     
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  7. David Atherton

    David Atherton Flavian Fanatic

    This video might wet your appetite.

     
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  8. 4to2centBC

    4to2centBC Well-Known Member

    That was fascinating.
     
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  9. onecenter

    onecenter Member

    I know almost nothing about Roman coinage and I found it fascinating, indeed!
     
  10. dougsmit

    dougsmit Member

    I have Butcher and Ponting's 1997 article when they were drilling coins of Septimius Severus. I have not seen this new work. My earlier objection is that the study is based on assumptions of consistent metal supply and a few coins drilled are taken as representative of all. In the case of Septimius, we had several mints operating in a wartime environment. Looking at my sampling of about 500 coins, I see a wide variation in metal appearance. I see differences in the coins of one year from those of a year later, from those of a different mint and from those of minor persons (Caracalla Caesar) from primaries (Septimius/Domna). Should I see differences between coins made from Eastern silver, recycled silver or silver processed by the night shift? The questions here come down to how we know whether the core drill advantage shows us anything beyond averages. Are averages really valuable? That depends on what numbers were selected to be averaged.

    http://www.newstrategist.com/store/index.cfm/feature/57_15/50-facts-about-the-average-american.cfm
    The above link describes 50 averages for Americans. Of them, I subscribe to 24 plus or minus a couple that would require more study to know with certainty. I am somewhat average in height and weight but a tad old and slightly ethnically diverse (we might call that a European mutt) rather than 100% from one country or with grandparents from four different continents. I suspect many of you are also similarly described by those numbers but may participate mainly in the 26 numbers I did not. If you are also a 24, do we resemble each other?

    Until the study has been done on a million coins and records are split by fine divisions of mint or date or circumstance I fail to appreciate the drilling of coins. I wonder if equal accuracy, on average, would be obtained by comparing destructive assays of a few coins but past practices caused people to destroy only ugly coins so their results were not representative. The cores may be the best answer but I suspect that their results are open to being made invalid by interpretation and averaging.

    I would like to see what they have to say about flan production. I hope they allow for differences we see in flans by the same factors that make averages less than informative in assay. Are the studies presented broken down in several ways or just 'Galba' and 'Otho'? It would cost me $138 to find out.
     
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  11. Collect89

    Collect89 Coin Collector

    I hope everyone at CT tastes this video appetizer. It is fascinating.
     
  12. Aidan_()

    Aidan_() Numismatic Contributor

    A very informative video Mr. David, thanks for sharing! And enjoy your big book. ;)
     
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  13. Orfew

    Orfew Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus

    Thanks for the video David, very interesting.
     
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  14. stevex6

    stevex6 Random Mayhem

    Cool vid, V70 .... ummm, it's actually "whet" your appetite (but your vid was so awesome, that you ended-up scoring a par)

    :rolleyes:

    thanks for the info (you rock)
     
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  15. 4to2centBC

    4to2centBC Well-Known Member

    I understand your point. It leaves me wondering about a couple things.

    Silver is about 17% denser than copper. I am not sure if it is possible to tease out the exact percentages of silver and copper by density measurements alone, or in combination with some other process. If so, then it seems it could be a quicker way to broadly sample a large number of specimens non-destructively. I assume this is not possible because smarter people than me are doing this and why would they not consider this obvious approach.

    Which leads me to the second musing. One could conduct a completely destructive analysis of perhaps 5-10K coins for a cost of perhaps a hundred grand or so. I believe that sample might deliver a statistical p-value good enough for this type of examination. I don't think you need millions of coins, but I am not sure. We need a statistician to jump in here. I haven't hit that subject in many years, but millions seems to be an unnecessarily high sample size.

    You might get people to donate unimportant samples (like my trajan decius) or find people to bankroll a hundred grand or so to cover cost of coins. Either way I think it can be done. People are bankrolling dumber things on kickstart all the time. The material loss of 10k (below average coins out of a world wide inventory of millions) seems like a small sacrifice if the information derived answers many other questions. Or if it validates or refutes existing narratives.

    Like I said, I understand your point. It just got me wondering what the actual challenges are, to do this correctly.

    M
     
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  16. brassnautilus

    brassnautilus Well-Known Member

    They could enlarge the experiment size with a larger collection of coins. Instead of measuring the density of 1 coin, measure that from multiple copies of the same type of coin, that used the same alloy.
    If there was no harm done to the coins, then I'm sure it would be much easier to obtain larger sample sizes too.
     
  17. dougsmit

    dougsmit Member

    Even after you museum people destroy a million coins, no gain is made if no one knows how to interpret the data. The question remains if the data collected is being studied on a per coin basis or just lumped and averaged.
     
  18. David Atherton

    David Atherton Flavian Fanatic

    The data is presented for each of the 1,136 coins tested. They are listed under the appropriate reigns by RIC and RPC number. Averages are also presented.
     
  19. Sallent

    Sallent Live long and prosper

    Holy cow, please tell me he's not still destroying coins. You'd think he'd have enough data after messing up over a thousand Roman coins.
     
  20. David Atherton

    David Atherton Flavian Fanatic

    The coins were not 'destroyed'. As a matter of fact, some of the coins which were tested I've seen in trade, ex Jyrki Muona collection.
     
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  21. 4to2centBC

    4to2centBC Well-Known Member

    Not sure what is meant by museum people (sounds conspiratorial) but once again, I don't believe there is a need to destroy millions of coins to get a statistically relevant set of data. I don't know why you shut down this line of thinking so quickly. Yes, 50 people do not represent 300 million Americans. I know that without looking at the study. Intuitively I can see that it will not give an acceptable p-value. Do you understand p-values? Not an attack, just a question, because I still don't understand your blanket claim that millions of coins need to be tested.

    Second, you confuse basic research with applied research. If one were to study a statistically relevant set of data, this would contribute to the corpus of basic research. How that gets applied can be left to further scrutiny, but it does not negate the value of the basic data that comes out of the research.

    I can't speak to the validity of the core testing methods used in the originally cited study. However, it would not take a very large sample to test the validity of the method. Several hundred coins of any condition could be first drill tested. and then ground down and tested to see how the results match. Simple way to affirm or condemn the method.

    As for those crying about destroying a bunch of $20 denarii.............science involves sacrifice and we are not talking about destroying Temples in Palmyra.
     
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