At Leiden University (The Netherlands), in the faculty of Humanities, students have the opportunity to follow two numismatic courses.
In a BA course Antieke munten als bron voor de Oudheid, taught by Paul Beliën (Curator of the National Numismatic Collection in Amsterdam and Visiting Lecturer at Leiden University) and Dr Liesbeth Claes (University Lecturer at Leiden University), students receive a historical overview of the spread of the use of coinage and learn how coins can be used as a source of knowledge for the ancient world.
The MA seminar Numismatics: a practical guide, instructed by Dr Liesbeth Claes, builds further on this BA course, focusing on the development of the different monetary systems in Rome, and the spread of Roman coinage throughout the Empire. The study of Roman coin hoards in particular stands central in this seminar. During the seminar, students also learn to identify Roman coins and they go on two excursions; firstly, they have a coin identification workshop at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (Fig. 1) and secondly, they visit the numismatic library of the Dutch National Coin Collection in Amsterdam. To pass the seminar, students have to write an essay on a self-chosen region in the Netherlands, using Roman coin hoards as their main source.
Fig. 1: Identification workshop at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden
Two years ago, the Leiden University MA Seminar on Numismatics started to collaborate with the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project. During this unique collaboration, students receive a special Leiden Seminar login code for the CHRE project website. With this login code, students are able to check, add or correct data pertaining to the hoards in their chosen region of the Netherlands.
The aim of this task seems very easy, but only well-trained students with a strong eye for detail can do this job. During the MA seminar students not only become familiar with the study of ancient coinage, they are also trained to find numismatic publications in the Netherlands and to deal with the problems involved with them, since most coin hoards are not properly registered by academic numismatists. Furthermore, they need to acquire new digital skills. For the latter, Prof. Dr habil Cristian Gazdac of the CHRE project gave a workshop on the use of the CHRE database at the History department of Leiden University (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: CHRE database workshop by Prof. Dr habil C. Gazdac
During the collaboration, the students of the Leiden Seminar are estimated to have increased by more than one third the number of hoards and single gold coins in the CHRE web app. As a result, the coin hoards of more than half of the territory of the Netherlands have been checked and if needed, the existing information was refined, added or even corrected by the students.
Liesbeth Claes, Oct. 2019
