News from the CHANGE project: the dataset of Anatolian coinhoards has now been integrated within coinhoards.org
The best evidence for the circulation and use of high-value coins in the ancient world comes from hoards, groups of coins buried for a variety of reasons, including for safe-keeping. Analysing the coins in hoards can tell us about how they moved from one place to another, what other money they were used alongside, and roughly when they were deposited and even produced. A statistical approach to groups of coin hoards can illuminate broader economic patterns over time.
The CHANGE Project has compiled a dataset of coin hoards buried in Anatolia or containing Anatolian coins in order to enable this kind of research. The dataset is now integrated into coinhoards.org, a bigger digital resource for the study of Greek coin hoards, hosted by the American Numismatic Society. Some Anatolian hoards published in the 1973 Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards were already published on the site. Finn Conway, CHANGE research assistant, has now linked the coins in these hoards to the ARCH typology (https://greekcoinage.org/arch/). Leah Lazar, CHANGE research associate, has compiled data on around 700 additional hoards listed in the ten volumes of Coin Hoards, supplementing with information from the original publications and archival material. These hoards are now listed in coinhoards.org with CHANGE inventory numbers.
The hoards described in the print publication Coin Hoards have been trawled for relevant material, with supplements from publications and archival material, and converted into structured data. The resultant subset of hoards is now published online at https://coinhoards.org/. The hoards found in Anatolia published in the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards, and available online at coinhoards.org prior to the CHANGE project, have now been tagged with URIs from the ARCH typology (including the CHANGE typology). The hoards published online by the CHANGE project will be linked to the typology by summer 2025.
In addition, data concerning 11055 coins found in archaeological excavations in Turkey (and some Greek islands) have been collected, with the resulting site finds database now available online at https://change.csad.ox.ac.uk/sitefinds.
Work on the coinhoard database
is an output of the CHANGE project,
funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020
Research and Innovation Programme, grant no. 865680
