"Archaeologists only..."

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Superficial cephalopods who want to justify no-questions-asked collecting may very well think "archaeologists know so little about ancient coins that they see their only function as a means to date an archaeological site", but that is very far from the truth. In Britain coins were used alongside other evidence to look at the Carausian episode (two publications at least in the British Archaeological reports series) also a source on the vulgar Latin spoken in Britain at the time. Coin findspots have been used by archaeologists for example, in conjunction with other evidence, to map the 'tribal' zones of Late Pre-Roman Iron Age Britain. (This in itself is an interesting comment on the same coiney morons' claims that "coins always circulated widely".) The arrival in the same contexts of Continental coins - again in conjunction with other material - has given rise to much work on clarifying the nature of the contacts between the various areas. The same goes in my own period with the distribution of Merovingian tremissi and related issues and then later sceattas. Their detailed distribution tells us about inter-regional contacts (and, in finer detail, site hierarchies across a landscape). Reece looked at coin deposition patterns alongside other evidence to talk about coin use on different types of sites in different regions of the British Isles in the Roman period. Tom Wilkinson was using the scatter of Roman coins in the landscape (off-site losses) alongside other evidence to say something about landscape use in Roman East Anglia. The wider patterns of deposition of Roman coins have been used in conjunction with other evidence to reconstruct political history in central European Barbaricum - for example the relations between the Balts and the Roman Empire (Jerzy Wielowiejski, Aleksander Bursche), or the movements of the Slavs outside Justinian's frontiers (Florin Curta). Coins have been used by archaeologists as an iconographic source (Elkins on buildings for example). And so on. Anyone who knows anything about the subject would know that coins are not used in archaeological research merely as a dating tool.

What is worth noting is that unlike coineys, archaeologists rarely use a single type of evidence (those round flat pieces of metal with pictures and writing on them) as the sole evidence for a piece of research, they are usually used in conjunction with other kinds of evidence. It should also be clear that for many types of use by archaeologists (as opposed to antiquaries/ antiquitists) for many of the archaeological uses of coins, we need to know something about at least their findspots.

Vignettes: Most coineys have only a very crude idea of what archaeologists do and are unwilling to find out. ACCG Executive Director Wayne Sayles who has sent out a press release attacking archaeologists, though not having the slightest inkling it would seem of what archaeology is all about, is a very good example of such intellectual fossilisation.