Right. 22 days later I’m back at the question of RRC 346 and friends. Here’s the post where this work got started.
Time is a mysterious thing: even as I log it here in these posts I still have an internal feeling that it is at once standing still and speeding forward.
My initial question is does this issue behave any differently from near contemporary issues in the hoards. My guess was be that it might drop out of the hoards. No dice. It is never a very big part of any hoard, but up through 78 we don’t see in the 24 available hoards any real trend.
I tried adding in a trend line to this graph and a linear one fit best with a very slight upward trend from just below 3% to just above 3% with a low R2 (.0106). I don’t put much stock in such a trend line other than perhaps to just confirm it is not a downward trend.
Another issue of interest is RRC 348.
Here the trend line dips, we have a very obvious outlier messing with our data.
The funky hoard is Alife (ALI in CHRR online, this is recorded with only minimal details as no. 234 in Crawford’s CHRR 1969):
Pozzi, E. “Ripostigli Repubblicani Romani nel Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.” Annali dell’Instituto Italiano di Numismatica 7–8 (1960–1961): 153-245.
This hoard closes at 87BCE and contains only 83 Denarii the vast majority dating 91 or later. Once it is removed the trend line for the presence of the Dossenus issue in the remaining hoards is nearly perfectly flat. There is no evidence the hoard was intentionally excluded in any systematic way.
The final issue of interest is RRC 349. It is smaller than the other two issues. (Yes, we can use RRDP data to quantify this and probably will for the conference paper, but for now just take my word for it.)
While it appears in far fewer hoards and never makes up more than 5% of the proportion 100-78BCE coins in these hoards, there is again no downward trend over this initial decade.
I hate negative conclusions they are so unsatisfying for all they are important. I think I’ve also learned a thing or two about how to make this process faster. I started by trying to emulated that work I did in the previous post for this longer time span and it was a hot mess. I wish it was easier to pull data for hoards out of CHRR online. I’d like to extend this by another decade to see if any downward trend emerges at any point. I doubt it but I like to be thorough, before I satisfy myself of the final conclusion.
I’m going to leave this data crunching a do some historical narrative writing next. Getting my textual sources in order and the prosopography might help me ask better questions.
Besides that historical narrative, I really really need to stop avoiding the smelting logistics problem, I’ve also got to put a little time into prepping for the grant planning meeting, and confirm Berlin dates (that’s just an email), and probably address Rome flight logistics and dates. Ok. I know that is too much for a single day. I’m just not that good as swapping between tasks. Maybe I best tackle some low hanging fruit before I let myself fall further into the 80s BCE.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 