Analysis of Roman Silver Coins, Augustus to Nero (2 BC - AD 68)
Kevin Butcher and Matthew Ponting, 2005
Silver coins formed the backbone of currency in the Roman Empire and are likely to have been the main media for long-distance monetary exchange. Imperial fiscal policies and financial problems can be detected through metallurgical analysis of imperial silver coinages. Roman emperors manipulated the silver content (fineness) of the coinage to solve short-term financial problems frequently caused by government overspending. For the most part, this manipulation involved the reduction of the silver content of the coinage debasement - in conjunction with a drop in weight.
The Leverhulme Trust (Grant No. RF&G/6/2002/0336) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Committee and the University Research Board of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon funded a one year project to apply inductively-coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) to the coinage of the first Imperial dynasty, that of the Julio-Claudians.
The dataset made available here consists of the numismatic descriptions of all the coins analysed, pictures of the coins themselves and the ICP-AES analyses of each coin.