Monday, October 12, 2009

Coin Hoards and the Population of the City of Rome

A new article considers estimates for the population of the ancient city of Rome based on the prevalence of coin hoards and suggests figures lower than have been provided before:

P. Turchin and W. Scheidel, "Coin hoards speak of population declines in ancient Rome," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (5 Oct. 2009).

The article is available online, but one must pay a fee to access it or log in from an institutional library that subscribes to online access of the journal.

A summary of the article is provided by Science Daily.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

How accurate can this approach be if coin hoards have been looted by treasure hunters?