Happy New Year 2019!
We are delighted to announce that The Augustus Foundation has very generously agreed to extend funding for the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire Project for a further five years. Marguerite Spoerri Butcher will continue to work as Research Fellow in Oxford and Cristian Gazdac as Consultant to the Project from Romania.
Our collaborations now constitute a major international network. 46 international institutions from 24 countries and 14 graduate students from 7 countries have already become involved. The network includes museums, libraries, antiquities authorities, national finds schemes, national banks, and numismatic societies, as well as universities, academies, institutes, and commissions.
January 2019 marks the official transition to Phase 2 of the project. During Phase 1 (2013-2018) we together succeeded in putting online summary records for 12,144 hoards and single gold coins, amounting to no fewer than 3.5 million coins. For pragmatic reasons we have had to delay entry of some countries and some other countries are inevitably works in progress. We anticipate a total number of hoards around 20,000, but who really knows?
The aims of Phase 2 (initially 2019-2023) will be to complete geographical coverage and to undertake the daunting task of recording hoards at the level of the coin (including RIC numbers and full descriptions), where such data are available. This ambitious programme will dramatically increase the usefulness of the data. We are also increasingly being offered data on Roman hoards from outside the Empire and are extending the project to include them, as again it will significantly increase research potential.
