Numismatics


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	Faculty Guide Professor & Chair R. Bruce Hitchner Professor Gregory R. Crane Professor Peter L. D. Reid Associate Professor Steven W. Hirsch Associate Professor J. H. Phillips Assistant Professor Emma Blake Senior Lecturer Betsey J. Halpern Senior Lecturer Regina Merzlak Lecturer Susan E. Setnik Lecturer Anthony Tuck Lecturer Peter Der Manuelian Lecturer Anne Mahoney Adjunct Professor George J. Marcopoulos Department Administrator David J. Proctor Research Professor Miriam S. Balmuth


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Professor Balmuth had spent seven years as keeper of the Harvard University collection of ancient coins, produced more than ten articles exploring the origin and early development of coinage in the Mediterranean and the Aegean (the subject of her doctoral dissertation), and has been elected Fellow of the American, Israel, and Royal (British) Numismatic Societies. She has taught seminars on numismatics, from which students have gone on to professional training.

Balmuth's work in the area of early coinage was recently reborn in the form of a paper delivered jointly with Christine Thompson, then a Tufts graduate student, now working for the doctorate at UCLA. This time around there are new insights made possible by current developments in technology and in field work. Stressing these new developments, a colloquium that she organized on the subject was presented on December 30, 1997 in Chicago at the meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, featuring historians, numismatists, and scientists. In 2001, she published Hacksilber to Coinage: New Insights into the Monetary History of the Near East and Greece.

A review of the book in 2003 said the following:

"Miriam Balmuth has put together an extremely interesting collection of essays in this beautifully produced volume that will be of interest to a diverse body of scholars with numismatic, metallurgical, archaeological, historical, and philological interests. There is much food for thought in this volume, and not a little controversy."
D T Potts, American Journal of Archaeology 107 (2003)

The colloquium set the agenda for the formation of a Hacksilber Research Project, including a group of archaeologists, an archaeological scientist, numismatists and an economic historian. It has undertaken the largest project of its kind to analyze hoarded silver of various shapes, including ingots, fragments of jewelry and worked objects. Using a data-base, originally begun by Susan Ingram, when she was a graduate student at Tufts, to uncover at least 83 hoards from Near Eastern sites, dating from as early as the 3rd millennium BCE and continuing even after the appearance of silver coinages in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, the project, supported by INSTAP, the Kress Foundation, Tufts University, and private donors, includes integrating the hoards with the study of history, numismatics, archaeology, and traditions of the region. The region, composed of the Palestinian Entity and Israel, has no native source of silver, but it has produced the largest known concentration of Hacksilber hoards. Testimonia and context combine to indicate that many of these hoards had a monetary function at the time of deposition; the numismatic and historical nature of the hoards, as well as results of laboratory analyses, are being combined in the data-base.