The XVIth International Numismatic Congress in Warsaw, 2021

At the XVth International Numismatic Congress in Taormina Sicily in September of this year, delegates voted to confirm Warsaw, Poland as the venue for XVIth Congress in 2021.  The distinguished numismatist Aleksander Bursche is organizing the XVIth Congress.

Poland has a long history as a center of numismatic scholarship as summarized by the promotional video presented at the XVth Congress.  It is available here and below.

Back from the XIVth International Numismatic Congress

I have been very busy over the past couple of months and so I am only now able to update this website after an entire month without posting. I expect to start attending to it more regularly again as I get settled into the new routines.

At the end of August and beginning of September I was in Glasgow for the XIVth International Numismatic Congress. It was the first INC I have been able to attend. There were approximately 600 delegates from all over the world representing all areas of numismatic study from ancient through modern. Of these 600 delegates, approximately 500-550 also delivered papers.

After the formal opening of the Congress on Monday morning, I heard Ute Wartenberg Kagan’s paper “Electrum Coinage: New Evidence and New Questions” in the session “Early Coinage/Persia.” I then ducked over to the session “Republic to Augustus” where I heard Jane Evans’ “The Restoration of Memory: Minucius and his Monument,” which provided much for me to reconsider in a chapter of the dissertation I am completing on architectural coin types. That afternoon I listened to a number of other interesting papers on the Republic and Imperatorial period.

Since I have focused my numismatic studies on the Roman period in my research, I decided to take the opportunity to listen to several papers on Greek coinage. In Tuesday’s session on “Athens and the Aegean” I found Clive Stannard’s paper “The adjustment al marco of Athenian decadrachms by the ‘gouging’ of flans” and Jack Kroll’s “The reminting of Athenian silver coinage in 354/3 BC” of particular interest.

On Tuesday afternoon I attended the round table on the digital SNG project since I am currently assisting in the management of the digitization of the Yale University Art Gallery’s numismatic collection. Although we are not producing a digital SNG at this time, many of the issues and opportunities that were discussed will be relevant to this work.

On Wednesday morning, I delivered my paper “Interpreting Architectural Coin Types from Recorded Contexts: The Flavian and Trajanic Periods,” which seemed to be successful. I also was grateful to receive a tip on an old published collection from Rome that may be considered as representing local finds. The other papers in my session (Empire- Coin Types (1st to 2nd Century)) were enlightening. Martin Beckmann, for example, presented a die study which provided a chronology for the posthumous coinage of Faustina I and which also showed a reverse die link between the coins for Faustina I and Faustina II. Later that morning, I heard more papers on Roman coin types, this time from the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD. The delegates then had a free afternoon for sight seeing, which I had planned to use to visit downtown Glasgow, but unfortunately it began to rain too heavily.

On Thursday morning I went to the round table discussion on “Coins in Context.” At this session it was announced that this event, plus the session at the Roman Archaeology Conference in Ann Arbor earlier this year, will serve as the foundation for a book entitled Coins in Context II which follows the publication of Coins in Context I. In the afternoon I attended the session on “Portraits/Iconography/Propaganda in Hellenistic Egypt.”

That evening was the closing ceremony after which everyone spent the next hour saying goodbye to various friends and colleagues before venturing off to hotels, pubs, or restaurants.

Since this was the first INC I have attended, I was happy to meet several colleagues I had corresponded with but had never met face-to-face and also to greet several others whom I had known by name only, and of course to catch-up with other friends and colleagues I had not seen in years. The wonderful and warm receptions at the Congress were very conducive to this activity; everyone was usually scrambling to and from the different sessions and papers during the day.

There was not a very extensive presence of book sellers. The three exhibitors that were present were Douglas Saville, Spinks, and CNG. Saville and Spinks had the most extensive selection of old and new monographs. I came back from the Congress a little poorer after deciding to pick up a copy of Rutter’s Historia Numorum for Italy, a copy of Duncan-Jones’ Money and Government in the Roman Empire, which I had used several times before though I had no private copy, and the latest Bibliothèque Nationale de France catalogue on Trajan’s coins to complete my collection of BNF catalogues that have been printed thus far.

I certainly look forward to the next Congress which will take place at Messina, Sicily in 6 years.

Photo: Colleagues at the closing ceremony at Wellington Church: (left to right) Cristian Găzdac (Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca), Ágnes Alföldy-Găzdac (National History Museum of Transylvania, Romania), Boris Kaczynski (Goethe Universität - Frankfurt), Fleur Kemmers (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), Stefan Krmnicek (Goethe Universität - Frankfurt), Nathan Elkins (Yale University Art Gallery). Above my head (Elkins) and in the background, you can see David Wigg-Wolf (Goethe Universität - Frankfurt) and Stéphane Martin (École Normale Supérieure, Paris) to his right.

Roman Architectural Coin Types and "Audience Targeting": A Preview of the Talk in Glasgow

At the XIVth International Numismatic Congress, I will have the opportunity to speak about an important facet of my dissertation on Roman architectural coin types. The presentation in Glasgow is entitled "Interpreting Architectural Coin Types from Recorded Contexts: The Flavian and Trajanic Periods" and takes place Wednesday morning in the Roman session "Empire - Coin Types (1st-2nd Century)," a session which promises many intriguing topics from colleagues.

In recent years, studies of coin supply and coin circulation rooted in archaeological evidence have attested that Roman bronze coinage was sometimes supplied to certain regions or populations based on the designs that those coins bore. This has important ramifications for the study of Roman coin images, Imperial ideology, and even Roman art as a whole.

In light of these developments in the fields of numismatics and archaeology, I decided to consider the regional distribution of architectural coin types in my dissertation from the Flavian and Trajanic periods since the Flavians and Trajan in particular produced a number of varied architectural coin types.

In Glasgow I will summarize my methodology and the results of this case study. There are, in my view, some interesting results with regard to the distribution and comparative frequencies of denotative types (architectural representations celebrating the construction or reconstruction of a specific monument in Rome) and connotative types (architectural designs evoking broader ideals or historical events other than construction).

For obvious reasons I do not wish to publicize the full results of this unpublished research, but I would like to show one of my pie charts (illustrated) which represents the regional distribution of bronze coin types celebrating construction of the Aqua Traiana for Rome that is one of the more convincing examples my research has yielded for an architectural coin type to targeted the city of Rome. The chart has been adjusted to account for the varying sizes of the corpora from the five main sample areas (Rome, Veneto, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia).

I would appreciate comments and discussion either in advance of or after the XIVth INC.

This post is protected by a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

"Coins in Context" at the International Numismatic Congress

Regular readers of this website will know that I have been making a series of posts discussing the new book Coins in Context I: New Perspectives for the Interpretation of Coin Finds, which was based on a colloquium held at Frankfurt University in the fall of 2007. The book was entitled Coins in Context I in order to indicate that research in this direction should continue and that future volumes may be produced.

Two contributors to the book, Fleur Kemmers (Nijmegen) and Nanouschka Myrberg (Stockholm) have organized a round table session on "Coins in Context" to take place at the XIVth International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow. The summary of the round table session reads as follows:

Coins are an integral part of the archaeological record. Yet, the coins are often separated from the other finds and brought to a specialist, who will treat them as a separate entity regardless of their find context. The archaeologist accepts the list of coins and lacks the knowledge to evaluate its full meaning. Thus a lot of the information of coin finds is wasted. Yet a close study of the context in which coins have been found might not only reveal a lot of information on the archaeological site, but perhaps even more so on the coins themselves and how they functioned in the past. By only using coins to establish the chronology of a site, the full potential of this particular category of archaeological sources is not considered.

When archaeology and numismatics are deliberately combined, the great potential of this approach will present immediate results. To study coins in their various contexts has greatly contributed to our understanding of the functions, use, loss and deposition patterns of coins, of the way and pace in which coins were brought into a society, of the perceptions surrounding the coins themselves and their deposition, and more. Such studies are not only of interest to numismatists, but just as much to archaeologists and historians. Nevertheless, this kind of research is still in its infancy, and often regarded with suspicion by numismatists and archaeologists alike.

The phrase ‘context’ is here intended as the archaeological feature (pit, posthole, well, etc.) on a site in which a coin is found, but also as its functional context (Iron Age religious site, late Roman villa, Merovingian cemetery, etc.) or its ideological or historical context as a context of thought and history. The research paradigm in which the coin is treated also constitutes a context, which may well have a decisive impact on the interpretation of the coin and its finding circumstances. Since the approaches of a numismatist, an archaeologist or an art historian are surely quite diverse, their research objectives will vary accordingly.

The aim of the roundtable session is to investigate innovative methods and research questions relating to the coins as objects with their own distinctive cultural biographies, ranging from the production context to the depositional context. We would like to discuss the topic in a broad chronological (600 BC – AD 1750) and geographical scope. However, we expect proposals to go beyond particularities of a period or region, and rather focus on theories and methods with wider applicability.

Program for the International Numismatic Congress 2009 Now Available

The International Numismatic Congress is held approximately every 6 years so that numismatic scholars from around the world can gather to take stock of the state of research on the discipline and to present new research. The Congresses are the largest single gatherings of numismatic scholars in the world.

The XIVth International Numismatic Congress will be held in Glasgow from August 31st through September 4th, 2009. Details from the program have now been made available online:

• Numismatic Lectures, Ancient: Roman
• Numismatic Lectures, Ancient: Greek
• Numismatic Lectures, Ancient: Celtic
• Numismatic Lectures, Ancient: General
• Click "program" to view a list of sessions dealing with non-ancient numismatic topics)
• List of Participants

Approximately Six Weeks to Register for the XIVth International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow

Approximately every six years, numismatists from around the world from diverse educational backgrounds and persepectives convene for the International Numismatic Congress to assess the state of research in the discipline and to present new research. The last Congress was in Madrid in 2003 and the next one will take place August 31st through September 4th, 2009 in Glasgow. Registration materials are now online and must be submitted by May 31st, 2009 in order to avoid incurring late registration penalty fees.

Call for Papers Extended for the 2009 International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow, Grants Also Available

Last time I checked the Call for Papers for the 2009 International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow it extended only until September or October 2008. However, this morning I checked the Congress' website and saw that the deadline has been extend until January 31, 2009. This is welcome news for anyone who has an abstract they would still like to submit. The committee has been evaluating abstracts on a rolling basis responding to submissions in the following month.

The website states: "In order to help younger scholars who may wish to apply for the INC grants the deadline for offering a paper has been extended until 31st January 2009." A new section on the website lists grants that are being offered by the International Numismatic Commission, Numismatische Kommission der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the Deutsche Numismatische Gesellschaft. The grants offered by the International Numismatic Commission and the Deutsche Numismatische Gesellschaft appear to be the most appropriate for those presenting research on ancient numismatics.

The international Numismatic Commission will be awarding 40 grants to younger scholars in the amount of 600 Euro each to attend the Congress. Further information is to be posted on the Commission's website in coming days.

The Deutsche Numismatische Gesellschaft is offering two grants in the amount of 500 Euro each. Those who may apply include: "Coin collectors at an advanced stage, students of numismatics and doctoral candidates whose PhD theses focus on numismatics are eligible. The following areas of specialization are desirable: ancient numismatics, German history of coins and money and German medals. The age of applicants is limited to 35 years."

The International Numismatic Congress will be held from 31 August 2009 to 4 September 2009 in Glasgow. The last International Numismatic Congress was held in 2003 in Madrid.