Heaps of Ancient Coin Collectors

Coin dealer Dave Welsh moaned here about my alleged:

similarly insulting (and unjustified) references to "heap-of-coins-on-a-table" dealers […] I have never displayed a heap of coins on a table, nor do I have any intention of doing so in the future.

I think the writer will find that I have been writing about “heap-of-decontextualised-coin-on-a-table” collection. The ancient coin dealer is however part of the decontextualising trade which stands between the coins in the ground in their archaeological context and the collectors willing to buy a geegaw of unspecified origin to add to those they already have.

This is a contrast to the kind of research on coins which takes as its startpoint coins individually stored each one labeled with the place it was found “Colchester Union 1888”, “STO’86, layer 256A”. This kind of use of ancient coins see them individually as single pieces of evidence which are interpreted in terms of the other evidence from the same and surrounding contexts. Here there is a body of theory, in particular relating to the taphonomy of context. Coin assemblages from certain groups, across a site, between sites in a region, between types of site all provide information about the past. In England for example numismatists like Richard Reece have long been publishing studies of this type which vividly demonstrate the use of ancient coins as a source of archaeological information that goes well beyond what is stamped on them. This information is lost the moment a coin becomes decontextualised and enters the market.

Let us take just a few examples. I am not a great fan of “metal detecting” or "metal detectorists" and “metal detecting rallies” in particular, but the plan here shows a plot published by the Portable Antiquities Scheme of the finds made during one such rally in the fields to the southwest of the small Roman town of Durobrivae.











(Google earth and finds plot from Flickr). As can be seen they form clusters, and a careful study of the Roman coins in these discrete assemblages showed they varied, in other words this was not a random pattern but various factors were affecting the rate of deposition of coins in antiquity across this area in the past. The second figure is a graph of coin finds from several sites in the Chester region (P. Carrington, Towards a model of Roman society in Cheshire First to third centuries AD, graph compiled by Reece and Shotton). The vertical columns are the coin periods established by Richard Reece for the study of British coin Roman assemblages, it can be seen that again patterns of deposition are not random, the assemblages of coins from the different sites have a different profile, and this information now has to be explained.
A third example might be the frequent occurrence of Roman coins in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and graves. By the sixth century the Roman monetary economy was a vague memory if that, and yet Roman copper alloy coins are found with some frequency in graves, often in a position (when the grave is an inhumation) that indicates that they were carried in a pouch at the waist. Are these just random occurrences? If not, what was the function of these coins? What part did they play in the world vew and belief systems of the Anglo-Saxons? Only careful analysis of the contexts of these finds can tell us – but of course each coin that a metal detectorist has hoiked out of the ground and lumped together with others from other sites into a bulk lot, another piece of information about the past disappears and the archaeological record is depleted. Very probably the metal detectorist never even realized that he was dealing with an ‘out of place’ artefact, and certainly the coin “zapper” across the sea who then destroys it trying to see if the campgate had a star over it or not will never know.

It is a totally different type of coin use to use them in their decontextualised form by the collectors who try to accumulate coins on themes such as “the Twelve labours of Hercules on ancient coins” or obtain “a campgate reverse from every mint” before selling them or whatever. It is in the name of this kind of collection that hundreds of holes are dug in the archaeological sites in the fields of England, Bulgaria and Palestine to accumulate bulk loads of ancient objects gathered from many sites together. The coins are separated out and sorted through, what is not deemed worthy of processing to sell individually is sold as the “uncleaned bulk lots” we see on sale all over the Internet to “coin zappers”. Whether a dealer gets his “Bulgarian specials” in individual packets or packets of four, six, ten, these are still part of the “heap-of-decontextualised-coins-on-a-table” market. Nobody at any stage has attempted to keep the finds from the Flavian fort area separate from the vicus or the temple area of a site separate, even coins from many sites are mixed before the first real sorting.

Aware of criticisms that the coin trade destroys contextual information, some collectors try to justify what they do. They argue that archaeological context is “not important”, that what matters is something they call “numismatic context”. Numismatic context […] is […] mostly concerned with the systematic study of dies and die-links, and also with the study of coin hoards and their dating” (D. Welsh "Preserving Numismatic Context from Destruction by Archaeologists"). The term “die-links” is a fancy way of saying that coin collectors just compare the pictures on one coin with those on another and play “spot the difference” and count how many coins of one or other variant they can find. The definition of "numismatic context" of Missouri coin dealer Wayne Sayles (‘ACCG opposes import restrictions on coins from Italy’) has a slightly more sophisticated wording, but embodies the same idea: "numismatists derive their own “context” from the iconography and epigraphical devices used on coins, the number and chronology of dies used to strike a given series, and the metallurgical content of various issues". The context of a coin is other coins, the only context of deposition of interest is a hoard. All the other archaeological contexts can be trashed as far as a so-conceived numismatic context is concerned. They say they need tens of thousands of decontextualised coins on the open market to study "numismatic context". I say this can be done with tens of thousands of coins whose context is known whether or not it is a hoard, this really is no hindrance to ‘spot the difference’ comparison games. Indeed what Sayles describes is precisely the manner in which coins from known archaeological contexts are also studied. I really do not know what makes the US dealer community think that they and their clients are so superior to everybody else.

The coin collector seems not to be interested in keeping the coins from different archaeological contexts separately, that would hinder sorting them into types and comparing one coin with another. This is a bit odd because series collectors of other materials (conchologists, botanists, lepidopterists, meterorite collectors) frequently catalogue their collections on the basis of where specifically the items come from.

I suspect the people involved in the trade of decontextualised coins do not see that my "heap-on-a-table" label is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Mr Welsh yesterday wrote me off-list an email explaining at unneccessary length that what appears to be a "heap"of coins on his website is not really a "heap" at all, but an assemblage created for imaging, and its not really on a table at all and he'd not heap coins and take every precaution to prevent his goods rubbing together. Nevertheless on V-Coins there are US dealers quite happily mingling ancient coins together in heaps - or box fulls. Some of them are called "dealer's lots". There are collectors who happily heap Late Roman Bronze coins in order to sort them to decide which ones to "zap", no problems with coins rubbing together in kilogramme bag lots is there?

Here's a still from Mike Pegg's wonderful (in a funny kinda way) "metal detecting" video I recommended a while back. Here we are in his back room with his artefact collection. Note how he has them heaped on a surface (no, Mr Welsh is right, it is not - technically - a "table" here either). When the video shows a closeup, there is not a finds label or catalogue number in sight which would allow a particular item to be linked to a particular findspot. I doubt whether many US ancient coin collections have either, whether the storage method is the same or not.


I suppose its a case of "show me your catalogue and I will tell you what kind of a collector you are".

Three articles by Nathan Elkins available online discuss the intellectual consequences of the market in decontextualised numismatic material from archaeological sites:

Elkins, N.T. 2008. A Survey of the Material and Intellectual Consequences of Trading in Undocumented Ancient Coins: a Case Study on the North American Trade.

2008: Elkins, Why coins matter, Trafficking in undocumented and illegally exported ancient coinsin the North American marketplace

2009: The Trade in Ancient Coins in the USA: Scale and Structure

These matters are also discussed on Elkins' blog, and on the SAFE webpage there is a "resources" page with further material discussing the deleterious effects of the trade.
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