Our project is an ambitious one and can succeed only through collaboration with numerous organisations, individual scholars and graduate students currently studying hoarding throughout the Roman world. If you are interested in collaborating with the project, or you have hoard datasets you would like to share with us, please contact Prof. Chris Howgego.
At present, we have established partnerships or data exchange agreements with the following:
Organisations
International
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Croatia
Denmark
Egypt
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Israel
Italy
Lebanon
Macedonia
Netherlands
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Switzerland
Tunisia
Turkey
UK
USA
Individuals
Dr Rob Bennett, author of Local Elites and Local Coinage: Elite Self-Representation on the Provincial Coinage of Asia 31 BC- AD 275 (2014) is adding data for Asia Minor and Syria.
Dr Anton Cruysheer is an archaeologist and heritage manager. He is associated with Portable Antiquities of the Netherlands (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), where he registers aurei and solidi. The aim of his project is to publish an article with a complete and updated overview of all Roman gold coins from The Netherlands. All data will be shared with CHRE.
Dr Cristian Gazdac of the Institute of Archaeology and Art History, the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca, provided a large dataset of hoards from Dacia and adjacent provinces.
Dr Richard Hobbs of The British Museum provided a digital dataset of hoards from Hobbs, R. (2006) Late Roman Precious Metal Deposits c. AD 200-700. Changes over Time and Space. British Archaeological Reports.
Dr Anahide Kéfélian, a Marie Curie Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College (2020–2023), has greatly improved and added data for the South Caucasus region. These were gathered within the framework of her RoCCA project (Roman Coin Circulation in Ancient Armenia), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 892180, as well as a John Fell Fund for Georgia.
Prof. William E. Metcalf provided an unpublished dataset of 180 denarius hoards at the level of the coin.
Dr Albana Meta is adding data for Albania.
Dr Emilia Smagur of the Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, is adding data for India and Sri Lanka. These were gathered within the framework of her project "Roman gold coins from India revisited: their context and function during the period from the 1st to the 5th century AD", funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (SONATINA grant 2017/24/C/HS3/00120). Some of the data were collected through cooperation with the Indian Numismatic, Historical and Cultural Research Foundation in Anjaneri (Nasik, India), or with Prof. Reinhard Wolters, who supervised her stay at the University of Vienna.
Graduate students
The project encourages graduate students to use, and to contribute to, our data in their research. They include:
Matthew Ball, University of Oxford. His research on Mass communication before printing: coin circulation in the Roman world, part of the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre’s Publication Beyond Print initiative, draws on, and adds to, Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire data to examine the distribution and circulation of the denarius in the second century AD.
Anni Byard holds a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership award between the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the University of Leicester. Anni will be adding British Iron Age coin data to the database and using it to aid her research into the Iron Age to Roman transition in Britain from the perspective of coin hoards.
Silke Hahn, Goethe University of Frankfurt, is currently in the second year of her PhD and undertaking a thesis on Roman coin hoards of the second and third century AD in (Lower) Germany. This project is embedded into the framework of the interdisciplinary Graduate School "Value and Equivalence". Her supervisors are Fleur Kemmers (Frankfurt) and Reinhard Wolters (Vienna).
Katharina Huber University of Vienna, is currently in the second year of her PhD, studying the circulation patterns of Roman Republican coinage in the imperial period. Her doctoral thesis is supervised by PD Dr Bernhard Woytek, head of the division Documenta Antiqua at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
David Martínez Chico, University of Valencia, is currently undertaking a Master´s degree in Archaeology and he is PhD candidate under the supervision of Professor Pere Pau Ripollès. His doctoral thesis will be on imperial hoards found in the Iberian Peninsula, from Augustus to the fifth century AD, in order to investigate monetization and coin supply in Hispania. He is member of the Asociación Numismática Española (Spanish Numismatic Society) and the Societat Catalana d'Estudis Numismàtics (Catalonian Society of Numismatic Studies). He is editor of Revista Numismática Hécate, a new scientific journal devoted to Numismatics, as well as the author of numerous national and international papers.
Nathan Murphy University of Warwick, is currently in the second year of his PhD, studying changes in coin hoarding patterns during the second and third centuries AD. He is working in conjunction with Professor Kevin Butcher of the University of Warwick and Dr Matthew Ponting of the University of Liverpool on their AHRC-funded research project on the metallurgy of the Roman silver coinage during the Imperial period.
Rasmus Holst Nielsen, DPhil-student at the University of Oxford. His research is on finds data and its applicability, focusing on Roman coins found via metal detecting in Denmark and Britain. The project is supervised by Prof. Christopher Howgego, Research Keeper at the Heberden Coin Room, and Prof. Andrew Wilson, University of Oxford. Rasmus has previously contributed to CHRE as a curator at the Royal Collection of Coins and Medals in Denmark and will continue to do so as part of his DPhil project.
Joshua Smith holds the post of Research Assistant at the University of Victoria and is currently in preparation for postgraduate studies, commencing in 2022. His research seeks to classify the geographical dispersion of coin hoards within the Mediterranean maritime economy from the fourth century BC to the fifth century AD.
Marcus Spencer-Brown, University of Birmingham, is in the first year of his PhD (started September 2020). His research focuses on the political ideology of the Late Roman state, specifically as expressed through the iconography and inscriptions of its coinage. He aims to help increase, and subsequently use, the coin-level data of the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project, in order to provide a quantified assessment of reverse coin iconography produced under the Late Roman empire.
David Swan, University of Warwick, is studying Cross-Channel Relationships in Coinage: 1st Century BC-1st Century AD as part of his PhD. He has previously used the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire Project to examine trends in the hoarding of Roman gold coins in Britain as well as hoards related to the Antonine Plague. He is currently working with Clare Rowan of the University of Warwick on Iron Age British and Gallic coins and hoards for his PhD. He has assisted the project by collecting hoards from Spain and testing the online database.
Žak Zupan is studying for a doctorate at the University of Oxford. He is working on Monetary circulation in the Western Balkans during the Principate on the basis of coin hoards.
Former graduate students
Ivan Bonchev University of Oxford, completed his DPhil in 2018. He gathered and analysed all coin hoards and the majority of the single finds found in the territory of Moesia Inferior, dated between AD 100 and 300. His study demonstrated how coins, through their existence as archaeological objects, offer profound insights not only into matters of the economy, state organization, and monetary supply, but also into the local history of the cities which operated as mints. This study attempts to build a new and detailed framework for studying and interpreting coin assemblages in this area of Europe. A major aim of the project was to create foundations for future research in the province so that every new hoard or stray find can be added to a common database which will allow large-scale analysis. Such a database will also facilitate the incorporation of Lower Moesia into larger scale numismatic study in the Roman Empire.
Duygu Özlem Breineder completed her DPhil in 2017 at the Department of Classical Archaeology, Ankara University. Her dissertation on “Monetary Circulation Amongst the Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire in Light of Numismatic Data” is an analysis and evaluation based on hoards, excavation finds and museum collections unearthed in eastern Turkey and northern Syria.
Corey J. Ellithorpe, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, provided selected data gathered for his Ph.D. thesis on “Circulating Imperial Ideology: Coins as Propaganda in the Roman World”.
Joshua Goldman studied for an MPhil in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford between 2015 and 2017. He wrote his dissertation on "The Coin Hoards of Roman Palestine" and assisted the project by collecting coin hoard data from the Levant, especially the region of Roman Palestine.
George Green is Lavery-Shuffery Early Career Fellow in Roman Art and Archaeology. He held a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Studentship at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, running from 2016-19, in collaboration with the University of Warwick. His doctoral research sought to study the metallurgy and circulation of Roman gold coinage of the first century BC to fifth century AD, in order to define its significance within Roman society and the Roman economy. It drew on the combined expertise of Warwick and Oxford in historical metallurgy, scientific analytical techniques, and monetary history. He made use of, and added to, data on hoards containing gold coinage and on individual finds of gold coins.
Benjamin Hellings University of Oxford, completed his DPhil in 2017 under the supervision of Professor Andrew Wilson and Professor Chris Howgego. His dissertation investigated the monetary integration of north-west continental Europe during the Roman period (c. 50 BC – AD 450) by considering settlement patterns alongside the distribution of numismatic evidence. His study-region was limited to the modern countries of Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and Denmark. He is now Jackson-Tomasko Associate Curator and Head of Numismatics at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Amy Nizolek studied for an MPhil in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford between 2013 and 2015. Her MPhil dissertation focused on late Roman coin circulation in North Africa and she assisted the project by collecting details of numerous hoards from the region. You can download her dissertation in the references section of this website.
Irene Soto, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, wrote her PhD dissertation on long-distance trade and the economic integration of Egypt in Late Antiquity. Her numismatic research focused on analyzing hoard evidence from Egypt after the currency reforms of Diocletian, with a particular emphasis on the fourth century CE. She is now Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University.
Ludovic Trommenschlager is Project Manager, Trouvailles monétaires, Bibliothèque nationale de France. He studied for a doctorate at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, France. His research focussed on an analysis of coinage in archaeological contexts in northern Gaul. He assisted Antony Hostein to enter hoard data for the Burgundy region.
Acknowledgements
Prof. Ahmet Tolga Tek for providing the project with a photograph of the Side Hoard, which acts as the banner image of the project.
St Albans Museum Service for the image of the Sandridge hoard of solidi.
