tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174756573570334952.post489230629130506529..comments2024-03-27T04:46:33.198-07:00Comments on Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues: “Barford is demonstrably wrong” about coin collectingPaul Barfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10443302899233809948noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8174756573570334952.post-58141507720566910162009-06-05T14:13:07.311-07:002009-06-05T14:13:07.311-07:00Re: It really seems to me to be incontrovertible ...Re: <i> It really seems to me to be incontrovertible </i>.<br /><br />Let us honestly consider just how much coins can tell us about the history of the North American continent for the millennia of human history before 1604 (or 1585/7) for example. Nothing much at all I would guess, and yet that’s tens of thousands of years of human history of a whole continent– invisible to the numismatist. How much though could one determine about the history of what is now the USA by the study of seventeenth century coin finds <b>alone</b>? I am sure US collectors can point us to studies of such coinage in the US territories, but my bet is that they use ‘extra-source knowledge’ to place those artifacts into an historical context, rather than creating them. I also have asked before (on Unidroit-L) how much one could deduce about later US history (going beyond the ‘kings and battles’ type) from a study of its coinage alone (typology, metrology, iconography).<br /><br />Coinage can in fact tell us nothing much about the history of Britain in the second to first centuries BC north and east of the distribution of “Celtic” coins in the south and east. Neither can it, in actual fact, shed much light on the history of a substantial part of the British Isles in the Roman period. Coin evidence tells us nothing at all from 410-ish to the creation of sceatta coinage (the thrymsas and tremisses are special purpose money of limited extent). It's a numismatic blank, but one in which a number of hugely significant processes were going on. The same pattern applies to much of northern Europe in this period. Even in the southern parts of Europe, the coin record is in a number of areas discontinuous in the same broad period (and later).<br /><br />The poverty of the solely numismatic approach to history is also visible in most of Sub Saharan Africa, and the few places (Axum and the Somali coast, for example) where older coins come from, the coin evidence alone cannot reveal a lot about past societies as a whole. More telling is ancient Egypt a flourishing civilization with a complex at times centralized economy which for millennia used no coins.<br /><br />South east and eastern Asia were coin using (lots of coins potentially smuggled out of there on the US market), but again are the coins always enough to tell us the full story? Several long-lasting conventionalized types such as the ban liang and wu-zhu and the Kashmiri goddess-king issues I mentioned in an earlier post rather rule out making such simplistic generalizations. The pre-Song Chinese issues are not terribly informative in general - that is even before we begin discussing the deceptive fakes now infesting this part of the antiquities market. Obviously some coins are more useful than others for writing histories of the region. There are also areas between these coin using groups which have no coins – that does not mean they have no history, does it?]Paul Barfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10443302899233809948noreply@blogger.com