What can coins excavated at a roman villa tell us about the site and it's wider context - Essay Example

It takes a lot of effort to divine some of these social dealings by the use of numismatics. Besides archaeologists and academicians, other groups of people are also very interested in studying these coin finds in ancient Roman sites such as social scientists, numismatists, and economists who try to impute social contexts using these Roman coins as guides for their study. However, it is often the case where there is no standard way of how to properly and scientifically catalogue these finds and moreover, and also no set standard for their coinage analysis.

Be that as it may, it is still possible to know how the people in a Roman villa had lived and in relation to the surrounding communities through the study of these archaeological coins. It just takes some time and lengthy effort for archaeologists and others interested in these sites to come up with their findings and conclusions based on a careful consideration of all the artifacts in an excavation site but admittedly, there are no set standards for doing this but rather only some set patterns which may be useful to make any comparable analyses with other similar sites.

This paper examines and discusses how the coin assemblage can give some useful and pertinent ideas of the wider social context in which these people lived in relation with their neighbors. A case in point of how Roman coins determined the wider context of social living in an area surrounding an ancient Roman villa is the fairly recent excavations at the San Felice Villa, which is located in the Basentello River Valley of Italy that separated the ancient vicus (Roman word for neighborhood) of Apulia from Lucania.

This site is a rich archaeological dig in terms of the old architectural remains (buildings and houses), artefactual assemblage, and environmental evidence within the site itself. Preliminary evidence suggests it was a part of a larger estate; it was important in fostering local and regional connections for the villa’s