It’s My Last Week
It is my last week in Athens and there is a lot to reflect upon. My research at the Agora has been extremely productive. This is in large part due to my colleagues, who have graciously supported me during my tenure here. The team at the Stoa of Attalos has been incredible. Not enough words can express my gratitude for their hospitality and support. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. Now, to address the past few weeks. Hmmm…
Colleagues and Friends
Pat and I somewhere in Athens. Beers immediately followed.
A week ago, I walked into my favourite coffee spot in Athens, Book Bar by Kaktos Publishing and bumped into a colleague from Carleton University, Dr. Patrizia Gentile. This was a shock. Pat is a professor who is cross-appointed to the History department and supervises one of my Public History colleagues. Needless to say, we were over the moon when we bumped into each other at a random cafe in Athens and ended up hanging out for the next day with her partner. It was a pleasure to get to know her outside our professional work environment, as we were able to release our inner Gen-X. We had a blast!!!
We chatted about many topics, from the history of Athens to our own research and some random rants about how the world needs more Gen-X. Or is that just my thoughts? Nevertheless, it was a great day. We learned a lot from each other and plan to collaborate more in the future.
Κόρινθος/Corinth
Two weeks ago, I went to Corinth to meet Dr. Guy Sanders, former director of the Corinth excavations. This was a much-anticipated meeting as we have much in common when it comes to the study of late and medieval Roman coins and have been virtually meeting for some time. Much of my current research at the Agora is inspired by and evolves from Dr. Sanders’ work on late Roman coins from the Corinth excavations. We chatted for a few hours, and, as always, I learned a lot from Dr. Sanders. He brought me to the museum, introduced some of his colleagues, and showed me some of the Manuel I coins in their collection. These coins parallel many of the coins we have at the Agora, but it is the hoards that they have recovered are of great importance.
Pat, Athena planted this tree as well.
This is part of a coin hoard at the Numismatics Museum in Athens. Note the extreme wear of some of the coins. Yet, the deposition date is only a decade after the minting of some of these coins. Hmmmmmmmm….do coins wear that fast?
Coin hoards are a group of coins either placed in some form of pottery or other vessel and hidden in a location (often buried) by an individual for recovery at a later date. Many hoards, that is, the ones we recover in excavations, were either lost due to an individual's inability to remember where they placed their hoard or because the individual either died or did not come back to recover the coin hoard. For my purpose, a coin hoard with a diverse chronological span of coins can potentially situate how coins wear over time. In other words, if I have coins in a single hoard from Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) to coins of Guy II de la Roche (1285-1308), I can reasonably postulate that coins take X amount of time to wear down to Y. This gives me evidence for a coin’s life-use. Potentially affecting the current dating schema for archaeological contexts. Such techniques are very important in the (re)analysis of legacy data (which is what I am currently working with) as many of the recorded coins from the 1930s excavations do not have detailed contexts and because minting dates (the creation of a coin) is what many archaeologists use to date contexts, this can drastically impact our understanding of archaeological narratives, i.e., the dates are too early! In short, Corinth has hoards, and I hope to access and research these hoards in the future. Again, this is all thanks to Dr. Sanders for reaching out to me on one wintery day over a year ago. I am so grateful for his generosity and guidance on this subject.
While in Corinth, I played around with 3D imaging. This is a piece of a column in the middle of an open courtyard. This 3D render is from a two-minute video in which I walked around the object clockwise and counter-clockwise, simultaneously moving the camera/iPhone in an N-S/S-N direction. The capture turned out very well, and the scale was quite accurate. Though I do not have the exact measurements with me, the potential for such technology is its use for constructing large-scale 3D visualizations of archaeological sites with greater ease and accuracy.
Furthermore, as I have mentioned before, quick video captures of archaeological strata performed in a rigorous manner before these layers are removed can be used as pedagogical tools for teaching archaeological excavating techniques and processes. By reconstructing excavation processes, we can provide another digital tool to aid in archaeological visualizations of strata levels for student archaeologists.
A Dime A Dozen, a priceless value
A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Acropolis Museum to walk around the open-air archaeological site under the museum. I have always been fascinated with this part of the museum exhibition complex. The ability to walk over an area that was a dense late-Roman urban neighbourhood is an experience, to say the least. However, I am more interested in how the public engages with the site, given that you cannot physically touch or walk through spaces in and around the architecture. Rather, you are guided by railings and a pedway that leads you around numerous housing and bath complexes; you engage with your eyes and ears, sometimes the nose with pleasant and unpleasant smells. On this day, I watched individuals, adults and children, toss coins into various pits, wells, and along other architectural features.
I noticed different forms of currency were used to engage with the late Roman site. It demonstrated how social/cultural belief systems could potentially be extrapolated from an anthropological-archaeological approach for the study of coins. Children and adults of all ages tossed coins into different wells/pits of the late Roman site. I took some videos of these actions. The cling of a coin hitting its target rang out. The low thud of a coin hitting the soil. People watched each other perform the act and proceeded to throw coins themselves. It demonstrated that coins are not just economic objects but socio-cultural objects.
In her book, Gold Coin and Small Change, Gabriela Bijovky notes, “[P]eople tend to get rid of low-value coins in their pockets in order to deal with petty-cash transactions, donations and even giving charity. The contents of piggy-banks usually comprise considerable numbers of the lowest denomination of coins: pennies and cents, which have little purchasing value. Moreover, the bottom of many public pools and fountains, such as the Fontana di Trevi in Rome, is full of valueless coins from places all over the world, thrown to the water by their owners with the hope and intention of fulfilling wishes” (92).
What intrigued me about this statement, when thinking about how people engage archaeological sites like the late Roman site, is the assumption of “valueless-ness” of the coins when deposited into a fountain. How do we define value, and how can such concepts be applied to medieval Roman coins? Surely, if I took the coins out of the pit in the above picture, I could still use them, implying that their value exists. However, this value is dependent on the idea that two individuals agree to its value based on a common authority. Bijovky’s statement also implies that coins only have an economic value, which is certainly not true, and I am sure she would agree. A coin in a wishing fountain/well has a value based on a belief system. It is just that these values are extremely difficult to tease out, especially if we apply this approach to the archaeological record, but this does not suggest we should ignore such possibilities altogether. Thus, watching people engage with archaeological sites with coins reinforces my desire to approach numismatics and archaeology in a more holistic-anthropological approach.
