Alexander in the Kelsey

In the last post I said we would talk about closed currency systems, but as I started studying the Hellenistic coinage in the collection (323–31 BCE), it became clear I needed to talk about a couple of interesting Alexander-type issues in the Kelsey and their history. I am not a Hellenistic numismatist, but fortunately for all of us, there is a substantial amount of current research on Hellenistic numismatics that continues to open major avenues of investigations and inspire numismatists and ancient historians alike. In the study of Hellenistic coinages, […]

Appadurai and Roman Provincial Coinage: Musings on Theoretical and Practical Resources

Today I would like to share with everyone, in case it is not already evident, the inspiration behind the name of the blog. The title is an homage to Arjun Appadurai’s seminal book, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, which is a compilation of essays by anthropologists who explore through different historical and cultural instances the politics of assigned value via the study of objects themselves. This book was assigned to me in classes as an anthropology major when I was an undergraduate, as well as in […]

Checking in from Ann Arbor!

Hello, everyone! My name is Irene Soto Marín. Welcome to my blog, The Social Lives of Coins: Archaeology and Numismatics at the Kelsey. In this initial post, I hope to tell you a little bit about who I am, what I work on, and slowly introduce you to the blog, where together we will be exploring aspects of the ancient world through the wonderful coin collection at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.  I am a new assistant professor of classical studies and assistant curator of numismatics here at the Kelsey […]