Simulation, Seriation and the Dating of Roman Republican Coins

Abstract

Seriation was one of the earliest applications of computers to an archaeological problem. Despite the origins of the technique in numismatics, the vast majority of coinage studies manually sequence coin hoards and issues. For many periods, the coin designs or legends can be used to provide a date. For the Republican series, however, detailed sequences rely on the use of coin hoard data. In recent years, Correspondence Analysis has become the de facto seriation routine of choice. For coinage studies, however, where the period of manufacture was very short, a successful seriation would leave one triangle empty in the re-arranged matrix rather than concentrating the largest values on the diagonal as would be the aim in other situations. The aim of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of various easily-available off-the-shelf opensource seriation routines that have been used in archaeology for the analysis of this type of data. Given that we know a great deal about the pattern of production of Republican coinage, it is possible to create simulated coin hoard assemblages to test the various seriation routines and assess which technique is likely to provide the most successful results. This paper presents the results of applying 14 seriation methods to 27 simulated coin hoard data sets, and discusses the results.

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“…379-396 in 5, for more background]. Putting constraints on CA scores has been studied by [40,51], while establishing bootstrap confidence intervals on CA-based seriations has been performed by [2,33,39]. DCA has been debated in ecology but remains popular [53,54].…”

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