18 December 2008

New Coin ID

Up late last night tracking down the identity of one of our tiny coins from last season. It's about 1.5cm in diameter, made of silver, and was originally a bit too dirty to read well, but thanks to the restorers at the museum in Perugia, it was cleaned late in the summer and I got to photograph it in September, when I was around for the conference.
So here it is with only very minor cleaning to get off the easiest dirt:

You can clearly make out the profile of a head looking right on the obverse (left) with some writing behind it ("III V..."?), and some pretty shapeless blobby thing on the reverse (right) with maybe some letter, an "M"?, to the left. A surrounding circle of dots can pretty easily be filled in for both sides.
Now here it is cleaned:

You can pretty well see that the head on the obverse has some kind of covering on its back half, while "III V..." is clearer and calls to mind the standard abbreviation for "triumvir": "III Vir." The reverse is still a bit unclear, though now the lettering to the left very clearly spells out "M. ANT" for M[arcus] Ant[onius], good ol' Marc Antony. You can also barely see some letters on the right and something vertical in the middle there, rising above the central blob.
So we've got a small silver coin dating to the period of the Second Triumvirate, which is therefore the oldest datable coin we found. And it's pretty easily findable on-line. I'll give the American Numismatic Society's record here, because they've got a nice standard way to refer to coins in their collection (which is on-line and searchable), thanks to fellow UMich alum Sebastian Heath, who is their Research Scientist in charge of such things.
Their description of our quinarius is:
obverse type: Concordia head r., wearing diadem and veil
obverse legend: III.VIR.R.P.C
reverse type: Two hands clasped around caduceus
reverse legend: M.ANTON C.CAESAR

And here's their image:

29 October 2008

Useful Thing with Circles


After watching one of our Italian grad students use a compass and ruler in a very impressive, but ultimately tedious way to calculate the diameter of the rim of a fragmentary vessel (= potsherd), I went on-line to search for a nice printout of concentric circles to make the job easier. Well, I found a couple, but they all printed out wrong, so I made my own this week using VectorDesigner, a decent vector-based drawing program that I got in one of those MacHeist packages.

Anyway, here's the pdf for anyone to use. Make sure that you check the scale after printing. I forgot to turn off the auto-scaling in my printer driver the first time and it ended up shrunk by a tiny bit.

Addendum 29 June 2009: Nearly a year later, I find a bunch of nicer versions of these at the bottom of this page.

24 October 2008

Google Earth

Sitting here on our GIS workshop at Drew, it occurs to me that I have never posted a Google Earth bookmark for the site. So here's one for the church of S. Maria in Pantano. We excavated just north of the church.

20 October 2008

AIA Fellowship

Interested students con find out about the AIA's Jane C. Waldbaum Archaeological Field School Scholarship here.

19 October 2008

Sad news


The mayor of Massa Martana died in a car accident last week as he was on his way to Austria to establish Sister City relationship for his town. He was a good friend to us and our project and will be missed.

Latest news may be found here.

27 September 2008

14 September 2008

Thinking ahead


Here's a little publicity flier for next summer. It shows senior Brady Eskilson with the stack of five coins he excavated in the final days of the dig.

Feel free to print and distribute. :-)