Two discourses

1I begin with a comparison. Some years ago I gave an inaugural address at a colloquium in Bruxelles-Brussel which was devoted to the theme of “Pottery markets”¹. I did so as an amateur self-appointed spokesman on behalf of the economic historians of classical antiquity, and emphasised that we were generalists who approached “as amateurs” the information which specialists – papyrologists, epigraphists, ceramicists, numismatists, archaeologists of every kind, etc. – were offering us in their publications: information which we then attempted to digest and use as best we could. In that specific context I offered a list of the sorts of information which we wanted and needed from ceramic finds and publications, but then went on to report with regret that all too often we found information about pottery to be intractable and indigestible. Distribution maps (when they existed) were partial and misleading in the absence of reliable information about find-spots; the agendas of art history impeded the activity of quantification; dates of production became depressingly vague once one moved from Attic or Corinthian wares to less well-studied or less attractive fabrics, and especially once one moved beyond the death of Alexander; plain wares tended to be ignored (at least until recently); and so on. The sub-title of that address, “Mixed messages and unharmonised agendas”, was therefore bleak but à propos.

2Fortunately, in this – again inaugural – address² I take a rather more sanguine view of the information which our numismatic colleagues provide for the historian. Art history is far less influential³; quantification is firmly on the agenda, even if it has provoked ferocious debate⁴; the bulk of the material is more manageable, at least as regards AR and AV issues; dates are mostly precise enough to be useful; issues of composition, purity, and the origins of the bullion used for this or that series have long been addressed; and in any case, since figures for the numbers of obverse dies in an issue already tell us something, one can advance some way economically in using numismatic information without needing to know much about distribution and findspots.

3Yet, that much said, all is not well. Though there are shining exemplars, I know from my own experience that it is very difficult for a historian of antiquity to turn her/himself into a numismatist – and the transition is probably equally difficult in the other direction. That is not just a matter of different sources, different skills, or different bibliographies, important though they all are: it is more a matter of using different units of discourse. For numismatists, If I may comment as an outside observer, the fundamental unit of discourse is the object – held in the hand, weighed, described, drawn, photographed, maybe analysed, and then catalogued, with all detectable die-links, within a series within an issue within a currency.

4I fully acknowledge the magnetic appeal of the object. As a post-graduate In Oxford, a century ago now, I was privileged to sit week after week tête-à-tête with C. Kraay in the old Ashmolean coin room, handling Corinthian and related pegasi and hearing much of what became his 1969 book⁵. The experience was both formative and hugely constructive, precisely because it was at once both intellectual and tactile: you hold a thing, and it is real, and it has a history. And yet a set of hoard-descriptions in the Inventory, or even a catalogue of civic issues, induces a sense of remoteness and impersonality, even with such lucid examples as that of J. Barron for Samos or those of the Elayis for the 4^th c. Phoenician cities⁶. That is a handicap, since for an economic historian the fundamental unit of discourse is not the coin, or even the issue, let alone the currency. Instead, it is two-fold: first, and immediately, it is the transaction, along with the human needs and desires which it satisfies. Secondly, both immediately and remotely, it is the commodity – what is being moved or transferred or exchanged or provided, in what quantities, within what trajectories of manufacture, movement, use, and loss or decay, within what institutional and political structures, and within what physical and human contexts. Neither “unit of discourse” is simple, for the “transaction” may be illegal, or conducted by violence or fraud, and the “commodity” may be an intangible good or service that leaves no physical trace.

5We therefore have two separate – and perhaps conflicting – discourses. Yet they can converge, and that possibility is both the key to this colloquium and the very core of it, for they come together above all in the case of the single find. In such a case the naive question “How did it get there?” is nourished both by current archaeological preoccupations with “The secret life of things” and the biography of the single object, and also by the knowledge that the man or woman or child who lost this coin had passed by its findspot and was the last in an untraceable chain of people who had handled it and used it, in exchange for whatever purpose, service, or commodity it was being used for. Its “biography” therefore takes us into the heart of exchange patterns and commodity procurement and movement, while the imaginable biography of the human actors opens up the whole world of human movement.

Three warning flags

6All the same, I have to raise three warning flags. They all have to do with the relationship between coins as found in surveys and excavations and the actual pattern of economic activity in the community or region concerned, and they all suggest that that relationship was much more complex and more indirect than one would like to be able to assume.

7In order to explain my first warning, and with apologies for what to a professional readership will appear banal and elementary, I need briefly to sketch the wider historical context within which Greek coinage emerged. If we think in terms of a very simple generative sequence, the motor, as always, has been the human being, whose needs and desires prompt actions of outreach of every conceivable kind. They range from Eve’s literal outreach for the apple of knowledge in the garden of Eden, through the traditional (and not just human) male pursuit of a mate, to today’s sophisticated and costly underwater prospections for hitherto inaccessible mineral resources. Such actions in turn generate the emergence of intermediaries, who act as agents in the search for, and acquisition of, commodities that are in demand, and convey them back to the area where active demand is located –unless of course, as so often, the commodity in demand is land or work itself, in which case the commodity-seeker has to move (or be moved) to the commodity via violent or capillary processes of migration. In turn, again, such actions on the part of customers and agents generate institutions and systems of management. They range from language itself, through the technologies of transportation and warfare, to the emergence and eventual consolidation of the state and its institutions, coinage of course being one.

8It may seem absurd and pretentious to offer this grotesquely over-simplified model of the evolution of human societies, couched in terms of the demand and supply of commodities and covering thousands of years in a single paragraph. It may well be pretentious, but it is not absurd, for it is only by transforming the discourse in a generative hyper-long-term way that the evidence which this colloquium presents can be placed within an appropriate framework. That is because, as hardly needs to be stated, the activity of procuring commodities from distant locations had already had a past history of many millennia in our macroregion of AfroMedAsia by the time that the use of coinage became firmly established in the Aegean in the 6^th c. BC⁷. Such procurement, well outside any plausible range of the exercise of power, had long since required the adoption of systems of exchange. We have no idea what those early systems were (we may learn more when proto-Elamite or the early Balkan scripts are deciphered)⁸, but clearly they worked well and endured for centuries into the Early Iron Age and beyond⁹. This is not the place to review the trajectory of the adoption of coinage within or outwith the Aegean, still less to enter detailed debate over chronologies, but simply to note plain facts: that, for example, the Aramaic-speaking communities of the Mediterranean – for all that they were the market leaders in exchange and procurement activity – took a century and more to adopt the new intrusion, and that other communities of the Mediterranean littoral and hinterland took even longer to embrace processes of silverisation¹⁰. Especially in light of the growing evidence for the use of bagged hacksilber¹¹, we should not therefore expect all acts of exchange wholly to supersede existing custom and to use minted coin. Nor should we expect it until the silver supply came closer to being adequate for the weight and intensity of transactions – a moment of equilibrium which there is no means of identifying and may well be imaginary in any case.

9That argument therefore sets up my first warning flag:

(a) That coin finds cannot be trusted to reflect the full range of economic transactions that took place in a given region during a given period.

10A second warning flag is closely linked to the first. We are all aware that the convenience and portability of coinage as adopted and developed in Classical Antiquity allowed it to supplement the use of precious metals by weight, just as the latter had replaced other measures of value such as the ox or vessels of bronze¹². In the Greek context, with which this colloquium is principally concerned, a large part of that convenience derived from the use of the precious metals AR and AV, since their relative and absolute availability in an Aegean-Eastern Mediterranean context was such as to render their use practicable¹³. Such coins were not just stores of value and measures of value, for the metals of which they were composed were also commodities in their own right. That is also true of bronze, though it took time for that metal to be as central to Greek coining as it had been from the start in Latium, and though Greece shows a far poorer array of surviving bronze tools and domestic accoutrements than the museums of Etruria display. The universal logic of supply and demand will therefore have applied to all four raw metals (Ag, Au, Cu, Sn) as commodities (as also, of course, to iron and lead) in ways and to extents that varied by period, by region, by the uses of each metal, and by technological change¹⁴. On top of that variability we have to place a derivative “demand” for coined AR and AE that had comparably variable components (for hoarding, for military and civic payments, for exchange, etc), and a corresponding “supply” that was totally fragmented, fluctuating, and unco-ordinated, at least until the 350s¹⁵. It is therefore essential to assume that “supply” and “demand” were virtually independent variables, and correspondingly to display a second warning flag:

(b) That one cannot posit any direct or close relationship between metal supply, level of economic activity, and coin production¹⁶.

11The anomalous relationships detected for Thasos by Picard¹⁷ therefore find some broader theoretical contextualisation.

12My third warning flag has to do with the much wider issue of contexts of exchange, and of the way in which coin finds serve as a proxy for them. Here we have to think of at least four kinds of exchange, two pertaining to the fiscal economy and two pertaining to the real economy. One fiscal exchange is that generated by the services rendered by a polity to its inhabitants and paid for by taxation. We may well regard the services rendered as being largely notional, but the coins that comprised the payments will have been real enough as they passed through the hands of tax-farmers, officials, oikonomoi, and bankers, and we may all have our own views about the chances that all those coins reached their proper destination in a civic or royal treasury. A second kind of exchange on the fiscal level is that generated by services rendered – whether voluntarily or compulsorily – to a polity or a ruler, or to an institution such as a sanctuary: I think here primarily of pay for direct military and naval activity, but also of contract work on military or civil or cultic construction projects. If such services generate remuneration other than subsistence, it has to be both acceptable and easily portable: considerations which, as I have argued recently¹⁸, help to explain the adoption of coinage proper and apply with especial force to what V. Gabrielsen has called the largest single market in Greek antiquity, that for mercenary service.

13These first two types have no one single or preferred location of exchange. Like the fiscal economy itself, they are diffused, though not randomly: bouleuteria and agorai are likely to have figured prominently, but also dockyards and sanctuaries. Matters are otherwise, not surprisingly, if we consider exchanges within the real economy, especially those which involve the acquisition of actual objects. Here too one must make a distinction, this time between long-distance and short-distance exchange. By “long-distance exchange”, which is my third type, I mean that which I have already referred to, namely the procurement of raw materials or finished products (including potential or actual slaves) from areas of production which lie well outside any political or patronal or military “reach” that the consuming parties or regions might have been able to deploy: the consuming parties therefore have to engage in some form of exchange. In a recent paper E. Fentress has called this type “elite communication”, and I have published a paper which illustrates it in detail by using the movement of aromatics from South Arabia as a case-study¹⁹. One may reasonably expect that the specie involved in exchanges of this type will have tended to be high-value: silver certainly, tetradrachms or the equivalent probably.

14That will contrast strongly with my fourth and final type, namely that generated by short-distance procurement, especially of perishables such as fish or vegetables or bread or of services such as cooking or prostitution. It is this type above all which has to be envisaged in order to account for the emergence of real physical markets in central places that could meet the needs of out-and-back movement in a single day from a hinterland within a radius of not more than (say) 20 km. This is not the occasion to rehearse the process of evolution which turned Homeric agorai as assembly-places, dancing-floors, running-pistes, and cultic theatres into periodic temporary open markets, still less to re-open the debate about the date and extent of that evolution, but simply to note the consequences. Just as text after text of Athenian Comedy Old and New, not to mention Theophrastos’ Kharakteres, casually note the low-value silver or (later) bronze fractions that such trade required, so too, and strikingly, paper after paper in this colloquium has reported and emphasised the predominance of bronze, reinforcing yet again thereby the overwhelming figures reported by Kroll and de Callataÿ²⁰.

15It will be clear that my four types of exchange are not clearly separated “Ideal Types” à la Max Weber: on the contrary, they overlap, as when a tax on retail sales links the real and the fiscal economy – and even that sort of tax need not only involve low value bronze, for purchases from the silversmiths’ street will have required the transfer of staters or tetradrachms in significant quantity. All four types, moreover, could have been transactions that were carried out not via the physical transfer of specie on the spot but by means of some credit-debit facility, whether bilaterally, or indirectly through a broker, money-lender, or banker, or collectively through a group such as a koinòn eranistôn. Though the extensive Athenian evidence for such transactions over-influences the picture, they were clearly widespread. The reader will therefore understand the reason for my third warning flag:

(c) The range of transactions that may be reflected by coin finds is too wide and too intricate to lend itself to simple interpretations²¹.

Seven minor case studies

16I turn now to review the relationship between coin finds and the contextual information that we have from other sources – literary, epigraphical, archaeological – about the economic and political profile of the polity or region concerned. Here, it will be helpful to begin by offering a check-list of the information about the publication of coin finds that it would be valuable to have. Specifically:

• On the coins as objects: What coins were found? What were their weights and denominations? What were their approximate dates of minting? How long had they been in circulation at the date of loss? What was the split between AV, AR and AE? What proportion were imitations or falsi²²?

• What were their issuing authorities? What was the split between indigenous and other? Which other issuing authorities are attested, and in what numbers?

• What was the distribution of find-spots, e.g. among categories such as agora, port, fortress/akropolis, sanctuary, cemetery, urban area, or countryside, and of precise find-spots within each site?

• What was the intensity of deposition within each site, in terms of its physical extent and chronological span of use?

• How do coin finds in excavations compare with the profile of hoards from the same region and period?

17Various examples reveal a very varied level of information, and indeed a situation wherein interpretation sometimes has to move from coinage to context, at other times from context to coinage²³. I offer a rapid survey of (mostly) small-scale or briefly-reported examples before focussing at greater length on two excavated sites where the difference between older catalogue publication and more recent studies reveals the emergence of radically different and – for the economic historian, at least – far more informative approaches.

18Within this series, my first is a case where the coins tell us precious little. In the relevant volume of the publication of the American excavations at the sanctuary of the Kabeiroi on Samothrake, under “Minor objects” precisely five coins are listed: all of bronze, all locally minted, and all Hellenistic²⁴. Given the town’s prosperity and power in the 6^th c., given the popularity of the sanctuary as a place of pilgrimage by the 6^th c., and given its key position in the post-Alexander world as a place of competitive monarchical display, to find a mere five coins reported, none from outside, is astonishing. It is all the more so if compared with the coin finds from a much less notable²⁵ sanctuary, that of Poseidon and Amphitrite on Tenos, where the editors of Ténos I report some 35 specimens of Imperial date, five being of Tenos or Andros, and some 80 pre-Imperial specimens²⁶. All but one²⁷ of the latter are AE, 58 being of Tenos itself, while the remainder are mostly Aegean and (if datable) Hellenistic²⁸. Without more material from comparable sites, one cannot be confident that the profile reported at Tenos should be seen as “normal” and that at Samothrake “abnormal”, but the discrepancy remains, each extremity prompting further trains of thought. Thus, various explanations of the dearth of coinage at Samothrake are possible²⁹, while the preponderance of locally minted material at Tenos raises a spectre, that of the so-called “festival issues”, which is the subject of much current debate³⁰.

19A third instance, that of the coin finds from the Antigonid palace at Demetrias, does tell us something. Those reported in 1976 from the 1970 and 1971 campaigns amount to 17 specimens, all AE (table 1). That six are Makedonian royal issues, seven are from adjacent Greek states, and three from the Akhaian League, is just what one would expect, and they provide a clear pointer both to the early 3^rd c. as the date of the construction of the palace³¹ and to the identities of those who frequented it. Indeed they give us more information yet, for the two overstruck royal issues take us firmly beyond 168, all the more as they are two of the six specimens found in the burnt destruction layer. We could date that layer even more precisely if we knew whether the number 106 borne by the exotic from Seleukid Marathos on the Phoenician coast was an ordinal in the Seleukid era or in the era of neighbouring Arad³². While therefore the coins from this site provide a minor but vivid illustration of how they can shape the historical understanding of the site, the economic lead which they give us hardly extends beyond a broad hint of local procurement for, and local employment at, a high-status site.

Demetrias: The Antigonid palace

20(Specimen nos from Milojcic & Theocharis 1976, 73 and 140-141.
Asterisked specimens were found in the burnt destruction layer)
Makedonian royal issues: 52; 227; 228; 229; *234; *237
Thessaly: Larisa 50; 51; 52; Gomphoi 226.
Magnesian League: 53; 235; (&*234 & *237 overstruck)
Euboia: 230
Akhaian League: *231; *232; *233
Marathos: *236

21A fourth case is potentially much more helpful, though it takes us outside the implicit chronological limits of this colloquium. Some 15 pages of Safrai’s fundamental study of the economy of Roman Palestine³³ report coin finds from the various communities of the Land of Israel and well beyond in the Roman-Byzantine period, with much quantitative information and a lavish provision of informative bar-graphs. He emphasises the same distinction between local and international exchange as I do, but is concerned above all with links with³⁴ and within the land of Israel rather than with the general profile presented by the finds. Moreover, he does not distinguish between hoards and stray finds or between metals, and regrettably ignores fiscal transactions, assuming that all such finds reflect commercial ties. Hence, partly because of space constraint but mainly because so little had been published by 1994, his information is not fine-grained enough, and is therefore tantalising rather than satisfying.

22A fifth example raises different issues. In a chapter summarising his team’s work at Euesperides just outside Benghazi, Andrew Wilson reports³⁵ that of the 365 coins found and catalogued, one comes from each of Athens, Kroton, and Aigina, two are unidentified, five are Carthaginian, and all the rest – 355 – are of Kurene. He notes that this overwhelming preponderance of local issues, together with the absence of issues from Egypt, parallels other evidence for seeing Kurenaike as a separate currency area even within the (itself closed) Ptolemaic empire: “foreign coin must have been exchanged and remelted to produce local coinage”. Plainly, that was the case: we have here to do with information reflecting numismatic practice that has been drastically influenced by public policy. We cannot therefore judge whether Ptolemaic Egypt was in fact the dominant partner economically as well as fiscally, nor whether the ten non-local specimens accurately reflected other exchange relationships.

23A sixth example raises a different issue again. In 2006 F. de Callataÿ briefly explored the application to Greek sites of both the “Ravetz index” and a “surface index”, the former attempting to assess how many coins had been found on a specific site per year of occupation, the latter attempting to assess how many coins had been found per m^2 36. Plainly, both indices would potentially provide the economic historian with invaluable proxy data about the intensity of coin use at the site. Though, as he noted, the problems of creating a meaningful Ravetz index in Greek contexts are probably insurmountable, the figures which he calculates for the “surface index” of three sites lie sufficiently within a single order of magnitude³⁷ for them to provide a provisional basis of comparison. By courtesy of Z. Archibald, I can now report that a fourth site, that of Pistiros in Thrace, has revealed 1 610 coins on a site of c. 0,5 ha, i.e. a ratio of 1 coin per 6,21 m². That that figure too lies within the same range is encouraging, though the wide differences in both the periods of occupation of the four sites and their functions enjoin extreme caution.

24Lastly in this section, I adduce one more from the very valuable suite of papers on the Hellenistic West published in Prag & Quinn 2013. A. Wallace-Hadrill summarises Clive Stannard’s 2005 study of the coin finds from Regio I insula 9 at Pompeii, and reports:

25[…] a strikingly consistent <distribution pattern>: a good number of local Campanian mintages, especially Naples itself; a certain number of South Italian, Sicilian and Punic issues; a substantial presence from Massalia; a massive presence³⁸ of the extraordinarily small bronze pieces of Ebusus (Ibiza), with the type of the Punic god Bes; and a tiny handful from the eastern Mediterranean. That is to say, not surprisingly, that Pompeii looks West more than East, and links to the Greek cities of Neapolis and Massalia, and the once-Punic Panormus, more strongly than to central Greece, let alone Asia³⁹.

26He then goes on to allude briefly to P. Guzzo’s idea that “Ebusus might have played a role analogous to Delos for trade with the western Mediterranean” (39). Again what we are given is tantalising, but this time on a much more solid basis.

Corinth and Olynthos

27So much as a sketch or summary of some small-scale illustrations, which indicate the various levels of information that the historian might hope to extract. In this final section I report on the publications of finds from two major sites in more detail, doing so partly because the numbers of finds are far higher, and partly because recent work moves beyond cataloguing to offer real economic interpretations.

28I travel first to Corinth⁴⁰, where the 1933 catalogue offers a profile of information for the pre-146 city (table 2). If we leave aside the city’s own coins for a moment⁴¹, and take rather more interest in those of the other Greek states than K. Edwards was inclined to do in 1933⁴², the heavy preponderance of Corinth’s immediate neighbours is exactly what we should expect, while the 33 Makedonian royals, ten being of Antigonos Gonatas⁴³, are wholly comprehensible in the light of the Makedonian hold on Akrokorinthos for most of Antigonos’ reign. So too are the 16 Egyptian coins, all of Ptolemaios III (247-222)⁴⁴, again probably far more reflecting a trickle-down from politico-military subsidy via a garrison than a simple reflection of market exchange. The only surprise, as Edwards rightly noted, is the paucity of coins minted in the West. Given all that we know about Corinthian activity in that region over at least five centuries, to have a mere four specimens reported is simply bizarre, but no persuasive explanation offers itself.

Coin finds (nearly all AE) from pre-146 Corinthos

29(from Edwards 1933, 13-74)
Corinth itself: 10 AR, 286 AE.
NE Peloponnese: Sikyon 104; Argos 14; Akhaia (cities & League) 11; Megara 5; others 4. Total 138.
Rest of Peloponnese: West Pel. 7; Sparta 6; Central Pel. 2. Total 15.
Central Greece: Euboia 12; Athens 11; others 12. Total 36.
Aegean & beyond: Egypt 16; Central islands 3; WAM & offshore islands 4. Total 23.
Northern Greece: Makedonia 33; others 8. Total 41.
Magna Graecia etc: Carthage 1; Rome (pre-146) 1; Bruttium 1; Surakousai 1. Total 4

30So much for the limited information which this catalogue presents: limited in part also because the exact find-spots or even sectors in which the coins were found are not recorded therein⁴⁵. One may now contrast that presentation with the approach adopted by Martin Price in his paper in Hesperia 1967. He re-catalogues the coins from a particular area, the South Stoa (so the find-spots were recorded after all) and then groups them by find-spot or find-area (table 3), in such a way as not merely to construct “a brief geographical analysis of the deposits” (table 4) but also to ask “Is it possible from the comparison of these deposits to tell how far the coins found were used as currency?” To which his reply is that:

The number of coins is not great, and therefore we must be hesitant in making general conclusions. There are, however, three types of deposit. Some are from fills or packing to floors, suggesting the use of rubbish or unwanted material. In these circumstances the coins were probably lost haphazardly, and their intentional inclusion, except perhaps for a few possibly useless coins, seems unlikely. The destruction fill of the wells, secondly, is certainly débris from a destroyed building, inclcuding shops, and the coins are likely to represent currency in circulation at the time of the disaster, a few bronze coins abandoned in the last moments of chaos. Thirdly, the habitation fill from the wells is an accumulative deposit, many of the coins, such as those of silver, accidently lost, but including some […] which may have been thrown away intentionally⁴⁶.

31Not only do we get that tentative model of the processes which generated the pattern of finds, but we are also offered a study of the relative numbers of Corinthian and Sikuonian coins through the Hellenistic period which suggests that Corinth “had ceased to issue autonomous coins by c. 200 BC, and for the next fifty years, in spite of her supposed freedom, relied considerably on the coins of neighboring Sicyon⁴⁷”. One could hardly have a more signal example of how the numismatics, the archaeology, and the history are indissoluble.

Corinth – find-areas

32(from Price 1967, 348-361)
PD: Pottery deposit from Shop I of the South Stoa
TCD: Terracotta deposit from Shop III of the South Stoa (?Sanctuary? 363n17)
S: Deposit from Shop XXXII of the South Stoa
Wells A: Habitational fill from 23 wells of South Stoa
Wells D: Destruction deposit of 146 BCE in those wells

Corinth - Distribution by area (from Price 1967, 363)

33Except that one can, for the evidence from Olynthos, my final and prime exhibit, provides an even more signal example. The basic material will be familiar. Those of the coins found in 1928 and in 1931 were given preliminary but detailed publication by D. Robinson in Olynthos, Parts III and VI respectively, and those of the entire corpus of finds from Olynthos and Mekuberna by D. Robinson and P. Clement in Part IX in 1938: a sequence commendable alike for its rapidity and for its depth of detail. As with Corinth, excavators and interpreters had the great advantage of a firm terminus post quem non for the bulk of the finds from the site – 146 for Corinth, 348 for Olynthos. However, there was one major difference, for at Olynthos the category “monnaies de fouille” also included a number of hoards, by no means all of which were to be given 348 as the date of deposition. The 1938 volume identified and numbered them, along with some others found by clandestini, reported the find-spots, listed the contents in detail, and offered likely dates of deposition: using Inventory numbers I have set the details out in Table 5. Not only that, but the authors used the new evidence not just for the history of the sites⁴⁸ but also for a detailed 200-page analysis of the coinage and history of the Khalkidian League⁴⁹. Insofar as an outsider can judge, the publication was numismatically exemplary: one might think there was little more to be said.

Pre-348 Hoards at Olynthos

1. (Ordinal numbers from Robinson & Clement 1938, 161-196)

2. IGCH 356 (Olynthos 1, 1928), c.479: 11 AR (Sermule 2, Terone 3): Olynthos III 8-12 and IX 165-6.

3. IGCH 359 (Olynthos 5, 1931), c.421: 19 AR (Akanthos 12; Chalkidian League 3; Perdikkas II 3; Athens 1): Olynthos VI 13-14 & IX 173-176.

4. IGCH 366 (Olynthos 7, 1934), 379: 9 AR (Chalkidian League 7; Terone 1; Perdikkas II 1); Olynthos IX 177-179.

5. IGCH 367 (Olynthos 6, 1934), 379: 9 AR (Chalkidian League 9): Olynthos IX 176-177.

6. IGCH 372 (Olynthos 4, 1931), c.348: 34 AR (Akanthos 1; Chalkidian League 33): Olynthos VI 12-13 & IX 171-173.

7. **IGCH 373 (Olynthos 9, 1931), 348: c. 46 AR (Akanthos 2 or 3; Amphipolis 1; Chalkidian League c.43). Olynthos IX 183-185. Not from the excavations.

8. **IGCH 374 (Olynthos 10, 1934), 348: c.84 AR (Akanthos 3; Amphipolis 2; Chalkidian League c 79). Olynthos IX 186-190. Not from the excavations.

9. IGCH 375 (Olynthos 8, 1934), 348: 75 AR (Akanthos 4; Chalkidian League 53; Olynthos 2; Skione 2; Terone 3; Perdikkas II 11). Olynthos IX 179-183.

10. IGCH 376 (Olynthos 2, 1928), c.348: 35 AR (Chalkidian League 28; Perdikkas II 7). Olynthos III 12-13 & IX 167-168.

11. IGCH 377 (Olynthos 3, 1931), c.348: 63 AR (Aineia 1; Chalkidian League 50; Olynthos 1; Perdikkas II 10; Skione 1). Olynthos VI 11-12 & IX 168-171.
    --------

12. IGCH 378 (Olynthos 2AE, 1934), 348?: 34 AE (Akanthos 2; Chalkidian League 25; Poteidaia 5; Skione 2). Olynthos IX 193-194.

13. IGCH 379 (Olynthos not numbered, 1938), c.348?: 35 AE (Olynthos 34; Lamia 1). AJA 1939, 62.

14. IGCH 380 (Olynthos 3AE, 1934), 348?: 12 AE (Chalkidian League 4; Bottike 1; Amuntas III 4; Perdikkas III 3). Olynthos IX 195-196.

15. IGCH 383 (Olynthos 1AE, 1931), 359-336: 10 AE (Amuntas III 5; Philip II 2; Lamia 1; Larisa 2). Olynthos IX 191-193.

34Not so, for two more recent publications have added new dimensions. The first was Tsekelas’ paper of 1996, which listed inter alia the 30 “hoards” of various dates found in graves at Olynthos⁵⁰, mostly comprising a few low-value coins in each grave and interpreted by him either as offerings to the deceased or as “coins for Charon”. Given that such coins were palpably “monnaies de fouille” found in controlled excavations, their existence, as coins plainly taken from current use at the time of burial, further weakens the intellectual membrane which separates hoards from casual finds.

35The second publication, Cahill’s book of 2002, goes much further, indeed leaps forward into that new world wherein numismatics, archaeology, topography, and history are again indissoluble. His section on “Trade and exchange”⁵¹ focuses above all on the distribution of coins within the excavated area, at a level of detail made possible by the cataloguing style of Robinson and Clement. He deals separately with street finds, with house finds, and with hoards, also depicting separately the distribution of AR and of AE: hardly surprisingly, the latter (fig. 1) is the more immediately informative. For hoards, he interprets their distribution as a reflection both of “the association between monetary wealth and trade and industry <in the case of those households> rather than with traditional pursuits” and follows E. Cohen in seeing them as evidence of participation in the “hidden economy”, in aphanès ousía. For house finds, he detects a direct correlation between numbers of coins per house and closeness to the Agora, with all that that may mean for the activities carried on in those houses. For street finds, he interprets them as the detritus of street trading. These conclusions are supplemented by observations on the balance between AR and AE and between domestic and imported currency. Along with the non-numismatic finds, they allow Cahill to paint a real portrait of the economic activity of the excavated section of the town: one awaits with lively interest what will emerge from the renewed excavations⁵².

Fig. 1. Distribution of bronze coins and of hoards, North Hill, Olynthos (from N. Cahill, Household and city organisation, 267, fig. 60, reproduced by permission of Yale U.P.).

36The reader will therefore readily understand the basis for a fourth warning flag:

(d) Traditional catalogues are a necessary but a wholly insufficient basis for inferences about economic activity of any kind. The precise find-spots of monnaies de fouille are essential – indeed primordial – clues to the final uses that were made of the coins concerned, especially if the location and other finds from the site are to form part of an integrated interpretation.

37Throughout this report I have been concerned above all with behaviour, whether observed or inferred. The exercise of compiling it has opened my eyes to the difference between the way that silver coins are lost or abandoned (especially in hoards) and the way that bronze coins are lost or abandoned. It is as if the behaviour of individual economic actors with bronze tells me more about the micro-economy (i.e. about their own small-scale actions) while that of actors with silver tells me more about the meso-economy, i.e. the behaviour of owners of property and investors at the public or entrepreneurial level, but neither mode of behaviour tells me anything about the behaviour of polities. The activities of the latter in minting and issuing coinages tells me indeed, though with huge margins of uncertainty, how much noble or base metal was devoted to the activity⁵³, but does not even tell me whether the particular city or kingdom was the beneficial owner of that metal or was merely the minting agent for such owners of bullion as wished, for whatever reason and on payment of an agio, to have some or all of their metal supply turned into coin. It is therefore the hoards, and above all the monnaies de fouille, that show us where coins were last used, and it is only by devising models of activity to account for such data that we have any hope of making progress.

38Underlying this entire paper has been the core question “Can monnaies de fouille be made to yield substantive economic information?” In spite of the four warning flags which I have felt compelled to raise, it is possible, in the light of my two extended examples, to offer the more positive answer “Yes, with the right interpretative approaches and practical procedures”. That is to say, though the practical procedures involved in cataloguing are obviously essential and primary, they are only the start, for what ultimately matter are the movements of people into, through, and beyond this or that specific site or region: and the absolutely basic drivers of those movements are commodities in the widest possible sense (intangible services as much as tangible objects) and the consequential exchange transactions, private or public. Everything that we can know about a site is therefore likely to be relevant to the process of reconstructing those movements and of locating them within whatever institutional or economic or ideological framework of action one may be impelled to hypothesise. Nor, alas, is it simply a matter of absorbing the contents of the single parts or volumes of a site publication, compiled as they mostly are katà génos (“The Inscriptions”, “The coins”, “The pottery”, “The small finds”, etc.), since what we need to do is to use them as the script for a single moving picture, itself changing shape and dynamics and locations as the decades and the centuries roll on. The task is plainly difficult, but the examples I have quoted – and one could add others, such as Kroll’s Agora volume – show us that it is possible. I salute all those numismatists who have engaged in the enterprise with such success, and on behalf of all my economic-history-active colleagues offer them my warmest thanks.