Coins

As in past years, we're finding a good number of coins again this year, exclusively Roman bronze issues so far. Coins are always fun to find, but yesterday we came upon a pair of coins in a "good" stratum, that is, a stratum of soil that lies below the plough zone and which we can place in relationship to other layers and structures on the site (like a wall or floor, or another stratum of soil). This means a lot more to archaeologists than how well preserved the coins are, because it allows us to use the coins to say something about the history of the site, instead of only admiring them for how nice they look (which is also enjoyable).

What was interesting about these two coins is not only that they were found close to one another (about 20 cm apart), but also that they date to approximately the same time (AD 230s and 240s) and that the later one is in remarkably good condition, so little worn that it could not have been in active circulation for very long.

It's a sestertius of Phillip "the Arab," emperor of Rome in the 240s, who was lucky enough to celebrate the 1000th birthday of the city (21 April 248). Here's an image, which is not as sharp as it might be, but which still shows amazing detail in the hair and eyes. You can perhaps read the inscription, which runs from about 7 o'clock, around over his head clockwise: "IMP M IUL PHILIPPUS AUG."

First identifiable coin of the season

While I was off in Perugia on Friday, one of the teams found two Roman coins, one of which was in excellent condition. Although we believe the stratum it was found in is essentially the bottom of the plough zone, and so not very informative for dating any phase of the site, it's always fun to find a nicely preserved coin. The obverse has the profile of Faustina the Younger, the cousin and wife of Marcus Aurelius and mother of Commodus (of Gladiator fame), while the reverse, shown here, has the goddess Juno with her favorite bird, the peacock, to her left. Faustina is called "Augusta" on the coin, a title she was given in AD 161; she died in 175 after a trip to the Roman east with Marcus, so the manufacture of this coin can be fairly narrowly dated. (Ooh, and I took this picture with my nifty new tripod, which lets me do macro shots like this even in low light.)

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:

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. :-)

Week-end!

Summer has arrived with a vengeance, as it's been sunny and over 30 here for the past couple of days, so everyone was feeling the end of the week today. Add that to our press conference on Monday and the near complete absence of unwashed finds and we were left with little to do. That meant a free afternoon for the American ragazzi, who prepared for their big weekend trip to Rome and Pompeii.
Yesterday we had a second ancient urbanism lecture and I gave them a couple of assignments to be done "on-site" in Rome and Pompeii. Beats the heck out of looking at pictures in Madison.
On the site, we're getting a much better sense of what's going on as we clear out more of the collapsed material ("crollo" is everyone's new Italian word) to leave the original walls of whatever building it was that we're working around. Some nice intact plaster on a few walls, and more coins - some even datable! - to help with chronology.
No photos as yet and I haven't scanned the excellent drawings by Gen Puleo, but we've got one of these from a good context: