On behalf of the Society the President has posted our sincere condolences on the death of our patron, Queen Elizabeth on the Monarchy website. All Fellows will wish to be associated with the Society in expressing our great appreciation and admiration of her seventy years of service to her country. The Duke of Edinburgh, who died last year, was an Honorary Fellow of the Society and as a Society we value our royal patronage very highly.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on Monday 26th-Tuesday 27th September 2022
The Round Table aims to bring together numismatists, historians and archaeologist with an interest in Late Antiquity/Early Islam in Syria/Palestine and the surrounding area. This will be a small, informal conference which will include at least 16 papers with ample time allowed for discussion. The central focus will be the seventh century Byzantine coinage circulating in the Near East and the Syrian Arab-Byzantine coinage, but there will also be a few papers on related historical topics. A full programme will be published around one month before the conference date.
All papers will subsequently be published in a new volume of ‘Coinage and History in the Seventh Century Near East’.
There is a conference fee of £35 which covers refreshments and sandwich lunches over the two days. A limited number of college rooms will also be available at a cost of £60 per night.
The conference is open to all, but numbers are limited and pre-registration is essential.
This is not an event run by or in conjunction with the Royal Numismatic Society. If you would like to register, book a room, or just need further information, please contact Tony Goodwin on a.goodwin2@btopenworld.com.
Registration is still open – email hlcevent@liverpool.ac.uk!
Attendance will be a mixture of online and in-person. Zoom details for online attendees will be circulated shortly. The venue for those wishing to attend in-person is: The University of Liverpool, Arts Faculty Library, Abercromby Square, Liverpool.
Conference programme:
| Time | Name | Title |
| Tuesday 19th April | ||
| 11:30 REGISTRATION | ||
| 12:00-13:00 LUNCH | ||
| 13:00-13:30 | Paul Craddock | Metals and Coins |
| 13:30-14:00 | Maria Guerra | On the two sides of the coins: Coin analyses to understand jewellery. |
| 14:00-14:30 | Thomas Faucher and Alexandre Bodet | The Frapper Monnaie project: Understanding die productivity in Greek and Roman world. |
| 14:30-15:00 | Peter Northover | Metallurgy and the Mechanisation of Minting |
| 15:00-15:30 | Patricia Carrizo | Archaeometallurgical and manufacturing procedures: studies of two copper coins dates 1851 and 1853 (OL) |
| 15:30-16:00 | Nicola George | Disguising Debasement: Roman Surface Silvering Technologies in the Third-Century AD. |
| 16:00-16:30 | George Green | Electron probe analysis of sectioned gold coins from antiquity: implications for cultural heritage research. |
| 16:30-17:00 | Jake Morley-Stone | Late Iron Age Coin Pellet Production in Hertfordshire, Britain. |
| Wednesday 20th April | ||
| 10:00-10:30 | Naomi Rubinstein | When identity sits on the surface: using pXRF to identify Constantinian copies in Romano-British hoards [AD 330-341] |
| 10:30-11:00 | Francis Alberade | New geochemical tools for silver provenance and fluxes |
| 11:00-11:30 | Tom Elliot | A critical review of LA-ICP-MS and the analysis of ancient coins |
| 11:30-12:00 | Camille Bossavit | Silver coinage production policies of Central Eastern Gaul (IInd-Ist centuries B.C.E.) : an analytical overview. (OL) |
| 12:00-12:30 | Leisel Gentelli, Gil Davis, Haim Gitler, Janne-Blichert-Toft and Francis Alberade. | The source of 5th century BCE ‘imitation’ owls in the Southern Levant. (OL) |
| 12:30-13:00 | Fleur Kemmers and Sabine Klein | Standardised or laissez-faire? Bullion characterization and silver fineness of Greek federal coinages (5th-1st centuries BCE) |
| 13:00-14:00 LUNCH | ||
| 14:00-14:30 | Stephen Merkel, Angela Celauro and Jane Kershaw | Silver, sulfur and salt: Experiments in Early Islamic silver extractive metallurgy |
| 14:30-15:00 | Tom Birch, Alex Metcalf and Rasmus Andreasen | Silver of the Abbasids: an investigation into the composition and provenance of North African Islamic dirhams. |
| 15:00-15:30 | Arnaud Suspene, Maryse Blet- Lemarquand and Jeremy Artru. | Archaeometrical analyses of Roman silver coins of the Augustan Age through LA-ICP-MS for the program MAN. |
| 15:30-16:00 | David Wigg, Sabine Klein and Tim Greifelt | The sources of the metal of Roman denarii – A multi-isotope and elemental analysis approach |
| 16:00-16:30 | Adrian Hillier | Non-destructively probing the core composition of coinages of the Mediterranean by using muonic X-ray |
| 16:30-17:00 | Matthew Ponting and Kevin Butcher | RACOM and Summing-up |
The Royal Numismatic Society and British Numismatic Society are each offering 10 x £750 bursaries (20 in all), for attendance at the XVIth International Numismatic Congress in Warsaw in September 2021.
Applications are invited from UK residents who are members of the RNS/BNS, or students (full- or part-time), or employees of UK academic institutions. Priority will be given to those who have submitted papers by the deadline, which is 31 December 2021. (If all bursaries have not been awarded by this date, we will consider further applications until 1 March 2022).
To apply please email the following to Henry Flynn, Hon. Secretary (hflynn@britishmuseum.org):
1 – abstract (max. 500 words)
2 – status (RNS/BNS member / Student / Staff)
3 – UK academic institution (where appropriate; independent scholars are also eligible). If from an institution, please state whether your institution has been approached for funding.
We were pleased to learn that Hodge Mehdi Malek’s Arab-Sasanian Numismatics and History during the Early Islamic Period in Iran and Iraq: The Johnson Collection of Arab-Sasanian Coins, published by Royal Numismatic Society in 2019, has been awarded third place in the prestigious International Association of Professional Numismatists (IAPN) 2020 Book Prize.
A preview of this groundbreaking two-volume work can found here. Copies are still available for purchase from Spink.
