In the world of potentially controversial topics, the idea that coins have a primary (if not singular) purpose—that is, as money—and were designed to facilitate trade, and continue to fill that role to the present day, is not exactly a hotly contested argument. Occasionally, coins are used as objects of adornment, whether suspended from clothing, incorporated into jewelry, etc. but suffice it to say, they are money first, and anything else second. There are other objects, however, that don’t as neatly fit the category of “money” yet are used to facilitate trade, and therefore their primary pur ..read more

By Liv Mariah Yarrow I never had the pleasure of meeting Charles Hersh in his lifetime, but over these last few weeks I’ve been meeting the man, his brilliance, his meticulous research habits, and a little of his personal tastes, all through his papers on deposit here at the ANS.  A few months ago a friend and colleague, Jordan Montgomery, asked me what I knew of these papers.  I’d seen a few scans of one or two documents and knew others had made some use of it, but really not much at all.  Jordan said his curiosity was piqued by conversations with fellow numismatists about  ..read more

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace. (Tacitus, Agricola 30.6. Transl. M. Hutton). Fig.1 Figure 1. Ara Pacis Augustae, 9 CE: Eastern Wall, the so-called Pax panel.  In the past few weeks, I had the good fortune to teach in collaboration with the New York Classical Club a three-session workshop titled Learning about Cicero, Caesar and Vergil via coins, where numismatic and literary evidence provided the means to discuss ..read more

Some questions seem too obvious to be worth asking. Everyone knows that a mint is a production facility that strikes coins. But wait—are facilities that produce tokens or medals included? Is it really the facility at all, or rather the organization that operates it? Or even the organization that controls how coins are issued? All of these possibilities occur in numismatic usage, and they aren’t always the same. Before modern machinery, minting of coins did not require much infrastructure. Considered on its own, the striking process only requires a pair of dies, a hammer, and a supply of blanks ..read more

One way to study numismatic objects is through the lens of the anthropological/archaeological concept of object biography. A helpful guide from Stanford University defines it as follows: “Object biography is a methodology that goes beyond provenance research to create close, contextual consideration of the shifting relationships of things and people as they circulate into and out of different social situations.” When it comes to ancient coins, archaeology provides the best insights to their ancient “biographies,” because archaeologists can record various related geographical, material, and dep ..read more

Heath’s microscope and one of his counterfeit detectors. The ANS Library and Archives recently acquired an interesting little gadget—one of Laban Heath’s Improved Adjustable Compound Microscopes. Patented by Heath in 1877, he sold it primarily as a tool for examining bank notes—“enabling you beyond a doubt to form a correct judgement of the genuineness of the work.” Ideally, it would be used in conjunction with his Infallible Counterfeit Detector, just one of a number of similar print publications that proliferated in the nineteenth century, helping people determine the real val ..read more

Everyone loves to find coins in unexpected places. There is always a certain thrill that comes from discovering those dropped coins on a city sidewalk or that loose change behind the couch cushions. The thrill is even greater when the find is more unusual or esoteric, like a bronze follis of Maurice Tiberius (AD 582–602) found cemented into a Byzantine wall when I worked at the site of Aphrodisias in the late 1990s, or an English East India Company pice found at an original Mormon settlement in Salt Lake Valley. Coins in strange places are great things. Nevertheless, it has always been of some ..read more

February 3, 2022 New York, NY For Immediate Release The American Numismatic Society (ANS) is pleased to announce the establishment of the Andrew M. Burnett Chair of Roman Numismatics. The newly endowed chair is named in honor of renowned numismatist, scholar, and ANS Board of Trustees Vice President Andrew M. Burnett and is funded by an anonymous donor. The endowment for the Chair of Roman Numismatics will allow the ANS to strengthen its long-term commitment to the study and digitization of one of the largest and most important collections of ancient Roman coins in the world, ranging from the ..read more

Since repatriating the die shells of the Medallic Art Co. (MACO), organizing and cataloguing these pieces has become a curatorial priority. During this process, lots of interesting pieces come along (as well as some not-so-interesting pieces). Figure 1. Copper die shell of the Abraham Lincoln plaque by Victor D. Brenner. The yellow electrical tape at the top is wrapped around the cathode, necessary for the galvanic process. The die shell of fame is the 1907 Abraham Lincoln plaque by Victor D. Brenner (Fig. 1). This is, of course, the inspiration for the Lincoln cent—one of the most famous coin ..read more

One of the more fascinating aspects of the American Numismatic Society’s eBay store are the numismatic stories that come with the objects we are privileged to offer. While every object has a story to tell, we aren’t always privy to the full story, apart from what we know about how they were made, who issued them, and where they circulated generally. But certain specifics—exactly whose hands something passed through, for example—are often lost to time, with the exception of pedigreed objects and the like. However, when the provenance or previous ownership of an item isn’t committed to paper, it ..read more