Projekt

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The research focuses on the development, functions and use of coins in the Western Mediterranean in the period 500-100 BC. The hypothesis is that the adaptation and use of coinage in this period might be understood in the context of the constantly changing balance of power in the area. In the struggle over hegemony in the western Mediterranean, coinage was an important instrument to finance the various bids for power, to display developing identities and shifting loyalties and to facilitate control over subjugated areas. Central to the proposed project is an interdisciplinary approach from the perspective of the 'longue durée'. For it is thought, that a comprehensive understanding of the adaptation and use of the earliest western currencies is best achieved by a diachronic, systematic comparison of the phenomenon within a wide geographical scope. In this way patterns rather than incidents will come into focus and as such might offer an insight into larger societal developments.

• Prof. Dr. Fleur Kemmers

  Universität Frankfurt am Main
  Fachbereich Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften
  Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften
  Abteilung II
  Frankfurt a. M.
  

• Retracing Magna Graecia's silver: coupling lead isotopes with a multi standard trace element procedure

• ROME´S RISE TO POWER. GEOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS OF SILVER COINAGE FROM THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN (4TH TO 2ND CENTURIES BCE)