I’m sitting in Berlin looking at tray after tray of coins and I’ve not been blogging as I want to maximize time with the coins themselves. But at this moment I find myself thinking intensely about the methodological problem of quantifying or just even communicating my experience of the condition of the coins taken as a group.
Right now I’m in the early 2nd cent BCE and holding many bronzes, mostly asses. I’ve been joking that only I love ugly coins more than pretty ones, but this is not strictly true. The coins aren’t that ugly but most are very very heavily worn. Anyone whose handled a decent amount of RR bronze knows this is typical. The head of Janus and prow are very often worn completely smooth by passing hand to hand to hand. Frankly I like the feel of these coins, the sense of human touch across the millennia is so immediate they almost feel warm.
This isn’t true of the smaller denominations I’m holding. I see many more clear fractional coins. When the small coins are ugly it looks like environment, not handling.
All of this is terribly subjective. Duncan Jones tried to quantify wear by metrology and assumptions about time in circulation, but this assumes the coins of interest have a relatively knowable original weight and that we can have enough specimens from hoards where we think we know the date of deposition. Metcalf didn’t like Duncan Jones’ methods and most have thus let it fall by the wayside. It was revisited by Hoyer in 2013 and for Bronze:
Hoyer, Daniel. “Calculating the use-wear rates of Roman coins using regression analysis: a case study of bronze sestertii from Imperial Gaul.” American Journal of Numismatics (1989-) (2013): 259-282.
Hoyer does more and better statistics with his data, but we just don’t have the same sort of data for these republican coins. And sadly few have engaged with Hoyer’s work.
I’m imagining something else, the ability to actually measure the smoothness of an individual coin and to do so in a way that would allow us to aggregate this data. A wear score as it were for the coin. Ideally not subjective but easy to apply…
I’ll keep dreaming. Back to the coins.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 
I’m sure that measuring smoothness will be possible in our days…Obviously, this will require a 3D scan of every coin, right? But that’s coming…
Dealing with my small corpus of Turkish museum coins, less glamorous, and damn are they worn. But that’s because these are all surface finds.
Enjoy Berlin!