Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology
ISBN: 9781782970842
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2013-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

A secondary use of Roman coins? Possibilities and limitations of object biography

Gordana Ciric

Introduction

This chapter presents some preliminary ideas and observations on the secondary use of Roman coins in medieval cemeteries from the territory of Serbia. Although noted by many Serbian medieval archaeologists, these coins have never been discussed as a distinctive topic. I will therefore try to shed some new light on this phenomenon from the perspective of object biography. Since these coins were used in more diverse ways than their primary purpose, lasting a long period of time in which significant social changes took place, the object biography paradigm is a highly suitable approach to the topic. However, in this chapter I would like to explore in greater detail what this concept actually contributes to the understanding of two specific case studies and where it fails to provide a meaningful interpretation.

Apart from Serbian archaeology, studies of reuses of Roman coins and other objects from the Roman period are not uncommon. Such cases occur in many Anglo-Saxon contexts, including graves and settlements (Coock and Dacre 1985; Down and Welch 1990). Here the question is how objects that do not belong to the usual material culture of one group are socially incorporated into the usage. A new aspect to this inquiry comes from the fact that the objects were not exchanged between contemporary societies, but were rather discarded and then rediscovered and reused. Eckardt and Williams (2003) made noteworthy contributions to this phenomenon by examining two main understandings of it, one emphasises the practical reasoning (such as recycling) of the new users, while the other seeks for belief in the supposedly magical qualities of these objects.

In the area of present-day Serbia, similar finds have been discovered in several excavations of medieval necropolises from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, such as Aradac (Nađ 1959, 67), Mirijevo (Bajalović-Birtašević 1960, 33), Mačvanska Mitrovica (Ercegović-Pavlović 1980, 65), Trnjane (Marjanović-Vujović 1984, 35, 51–52) and Konopljara (Berić 2001, 110, 113). Usually these coins were understood as just ancient coins with secondary uses without further inquiry. I argue that this derives from, among other things, an inventory methodology in exploring necropolises. Putting artefacts from the necropolis into pre-ordained categories, these particular coins tend to lose their place in the supposed scheme. Sometimes the coins are reused as pendants on a necklace, so they can be classified as both coins and jewellery. In contrast to their multiple categorizations, these coins are also generally featureless. Another problem in the analysis of coins in general is the division between the numismatic and archaeological approaches (for more on the position of numismatics today, see Kemmers and Myrberg 2011). In traditional numismatic analysis, the coin is usually the primary source of data. Its shape, weight, material, inscription and depiction are of the utmost importance, while little attention is given to the context of a coin’s discovery. “Apart from its immediate physical characteristics, a coin’s most easily distinguishable features are its types – designs and inscriptions” (Brooke et al. 1983, xxvii–xxviii). On the

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