This volume, based on a conference that was held in 2016, is the first publication to come out of the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project, which is creating a record of all coin hoards from across the Roman Empire and beyond, from the start of the Empire under Augustus to c.AD 400. The project, which is the vision of Chris Howgego of the Ashmolean Museum, is funded by the Augustus Foundation. An impressive number of partners from 25 countries are contributing data to it. In October 2021, the database (https://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk) comprised 16,374 hoards, but that is by no means a final figure, as new partners continue to add data and new hoards are found (in Britain alone, some 60 new Roman coin hoards are recorded annually).
The database will grow in usefulness as the records of individual hoards are expanded from summaries to include details of individual coins in each hoard. In an area as large as the Roman Empire and its hinterland, the completeness of the hoard record varies widely (a high proportion of hoards from north-west Europe are recorded, rather less from the Mediterranean, and very few from areas such as North Africa). That is unavoidable, and the scope and ambition of the dataset is nonetheless impressive.
Retro Zoomers