This edited volume is fundamentally about a vast amount of quantitative data, how it has been collected and made publicly available, and how it may influence our knowledge of the Roman world, broadly conceived. Unfortunately, a portion of the audience for such scholarship harbours a reluctance to engage in statistical analyses and other quantitative methodologies, even as they value the results. The editors lean into this challenge by giving Kris Lockyear's essay, ‘Simplifying Complexity’, a lead position. It most certainly influenced how this particular reader approached all subsequent chapters. Lockyear points out that, as far as the most popular forms of data visualisation in numismatics are concerned, the bar graph first appeared in the late eighteenth century and the distribution map in the mid-nineteenth. Throughout the volume as a whole, bar graphs and distribution maps abound. Lockyear bemoans that even after some three decades of applying correspondence analysis (CA) to hoard data and publishing numerous discoveries as a result, his techniques still need explaining and are rarely adopted by others. His chapter ends with an appendix explaining the rudimentary practical steps. (This reader tested the instructions with at least a modicum of success. The challenge was not the application of the technique, but choosing data and preparing it appropriately.)
The majority of the volume is given over to regional studies, eight chapters in total, covering Britain, Burgundy, southern Greece and Macedonia, Dacia, Moesia Inferior, Palestine and Egypt. Each of these studies will be of most immediate interest to researchers focused on the specific regions under Roman rule. Here I hope to highlight those characteristics of individual chapters that might be of particular interest to a more general readership. Ghey's chapter on ‘Hoarding in Roman Britain’, for instance, puts particular emphasis on archaeological context for interpreting hoards. She compares data on both single-coin and select-site finds with hoard data to show that the peak in hoarding seen in the last third of the third century c.e. seems to parallel the overall abundance of coin in circulation, whereas the peak in hoarding during the last decade of the fourth century has no such correlation (62–3). Hostein and Nouvel, in their piece, also emphasise the distribution of hoards and the type of sites within the civitas Aeduorum where they are found. It is a great shame some of their maps illustrating change over time have been printed so small as to be hardly legible (e.g. fig. 4.4). They focus on coin hoards found at rural settlements as a potential proxy for estimating the wealth of ancient landowners.
Of regional studies within the volume, Mairat's on the Gallic Empire arguably covers the largest sweep of territory. He approaches the coinage of this breakaway state first by type and then by sub-region. Of perhaps greatest importance are his observations of coin circulation in Hispania and the need to study the hoards in light of the epigraphic evidence. Iakovidou and Kremydi take a broadly chronological approach in their comparison of hoards from southern Greece and Macedonia; their approach bears fruit in their ability to show how the role of provincial bronzes changes over time from nearly exclusively local circulations to wider regional circulation. This immediately raises questions about whether this same trend can be traced in other regions over the same historical periods. Bonchev brings in just such a cross-regional comparison to explain patterns in the hoarding of provincial Bronzes in Moesia. Goldman uses the example of Palestine to provide empirical evidence that major political conflicts and mass violence do indeed result in a spike in unrecovered hoards.
The final section of the volume, called ‘Longevity of Circulation’, contains a series of papers all deeply individually valuable but less directly connected to the overall theme of hoarding and of a very different character to the preceding chapters. Woytek's chapter on restored denarii is a much needed and up-to-date overview in English of the phenomenon. Likewise Hobbs’ contribution on silver plate and its role in late antique largitio challenges numismatists to think of objects often classified as luxury or decorative arts as potentially having a denomination system and playing an integral role in the monetary economy. Neither chapter draws extensively on hoard data, but may change how the readership thinks about hoards and hoarding in the respective time periods. Von Heesch and Hellings separately tackle long-standing questions in the field, namely the so-called big problem of small change and methods of measuring historic coin supply and estimating the longevity of circulation. Both make good use of newly available data and provide smart interventions into the state of our knowledge.
This volume overall is a testimony to the success of Linked Open Data initiatives under the auspices of Nomisma.org in not only connecting disparate digital humanities projects, but also in its ability to support further academic research by making vast amounts of new data from the ancient world accessible to us all. Along with my recommendation of this edited volume to you, I strongly urge you to explore alongside it Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire (chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk), a masterpiece of design and utility, and the repository for the vast majority of the data underlying the scholarship in this book.
