Aurei in Egypt: Karanis Hoard 4

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 […]

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 […]