In a recent post on her blog, Adventures in My Head, historian Liv Mariah Yarrow discusses a coin in the Kelsey Museum numismatic collection. But it’s not one that was excavated from a secure archaeological context like most of the other coins among the 40,000+ housed at the Kelsey. In fact, it’s a fake. Read more about how scholars spot fakes and what can be learned from them in Professor Yarrow’s fascinating blog post.
Liv Mariah Yarrow is a historian of the Roman Republic focusing primarily on numismatics and historiography. She is a professor at the City University of New York, teaching classics at Brooklyn College and classics and history at the Graduate Center. Her books include Historiography at the End of the Republic: Provincial Perspectives on Roman Rule (Oxford 2006) and The Republic to 49 BCE: Using Coins as Sources (Cambridge 2021). She co-directs the Roman Republican Die Project with Dr. Lucia Carbone at the American Numismatic Society, preserving and expanding the work of Dr. Richard Schaefer.