Uncategorized – The Social Lives of Coins

A Kelsey coin in the blogosphere: “Lessons from a Fake”

November 29, 2021November 29, 2021 leschramUncategorized

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. […]

Guest Post: IPCAA Student James Prosser

September 7, 2021September 13, 2021 irenesmUncategorized

Hello, everyone! My name is James Prosser and I am working this summer as a research assistant with Irene to start photographing and cataloging some of the over 40,000(!) ancient coins that are housed in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Since I am helping out, Irene has offered to have me write a blog post to introduce myself and show the kind of work that is ongoing with the collection. I am a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art & Archaeology (IPCAA) at the University of Michigan. […]

Teaching with Coins Remotely

April 12, 2021April 23, 2021 irenesmUncategorized

I am back! This first teaching semester as a new assistant professor/curator has been a tough one, especially during pandemic times, so I have had to leave the blog to the side by necessity. But I am happy to say I have been coin-busy as well. As part of my class “Long Distance Trade in Antiquity,” my colleague Prof. Janet Richards and I set up the curatorial lab so we could teach remotely with objects (coins, in my case) and it was incredibly successful! Here are the products we […]

Aurei in Egypt: Karanis Hoard 4

January 20, 2021January 25, 2021 irenesmUncategorized

A hoard on display in the Kelsey Museum has been on my mind lately. Hoard 4 from Karanis, containing 60 Roman aurei, was found in a courtyard of B11, a second-century house at the site. The hoard had originally been stored in a cloth bag, whose only remnants were traces of mesh weave left in the soil around it. Some textile remains from a cloth bag were found nearby, possibly part of the original bag that held the coins (Haatvedt and Peterson 1964, 14–15). Twenty-two coins were retained by […]

Hellenistic Currency Systems in the Kelsey: The Ptolemies, Part II

December 2, 2020 irenesmUncategorized

Last post we talked a little bit about the closed currency system instituted by Ptolemy I in Egypt in the late 4th century BCE. We talked about how such a system allowed the Ptolemies to control the amount of precious metals in their economy, particularly silver, an element that does not occur naturally in the Egyptian territory, and the metal out of which the international currency of the time was made — the Attic silver standard (for a more detailed analysis on the implementation of a closed currency system by […]

Hellenistic Currency Systems in the Kelsey: The Ptolemies, Part I

November 11, 2020November 11, 2020 irenesmUncategorized

As you all know, I have been getting to know the Hellenistic coinages at the Kelsey this month, and I thought it could be interesting for me, a Late Antique person, to have a refresher course on the history of Hellenistic coinages via this blog. Thus, for the next few months, in no particular order, I will write some introductory posts on the Ptolemaic, Seleukid, Macedonian, and Pergamene kingdoms, with special emphasis on the nature of their currency systems (i.e., open, closed, etc.) There are coins in the Kelsey’s collection […]

Alexander in the Kelsey

October 28, 2020November 10, 2020 irenesmUncategorized

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

October 14, 2020October 14, 2020 irenesmUncategorized

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!

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 irenesmUncategorized

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 […]