The E-Sylum:  Volume 10, Number 5, February 4, 2007, Article 22

ARCHAEOLOGISTS, ECONOMISTS AND NUMISMATISTS - OH MY!

Howard Daniel writes: "Last week's item 'Archaeologists Find
Contemporary Debased Spanish Coin in St. Augustine', reminded me
of my attending the last ANA show or convention in Jacksonville,
Florida, just north of St. Augustine.

"A few months before that ANA, I read an article somewhere about the
University of North Florida discovering some coins in digging in the
old waterfront of Jacksonville.  It has been awhile and I cannot
remember the exact pieces they found.  I wrote to the department head
at the university and said I would be glad to speak to him and his
students about coins found in other archaeological digs.  He immediately
replied in the affirmative and we set up a two-hour session from 11AM
to 1PM on the day before the ANA.

"I arrived about an hour early and was shown to a "lab" room where I
set up.  They were all archaeological and anthropology students working
on their masters and/or doctorates, and a couple of professors.  I had
bought several references and photocopied many articles that I gave to
them.  Then I started telling them about the digs I knew about in
Southeast Asia where coins were found and how important they were to
deciphering what was being found.

"The audience was mostly unknowledgeable about numismatics and they
were quite pleased that the coins they had found could be of a great
help to them.  It was a most enjoyable two hours for me and I think I
probably got five or six of the twenty-four plus people in the audience
strongly interested in numismatics.  I would highly recommend your
readers to contact these departments (plus history and economics) in
their nearby colleges and universities and volunteer to speak to them
about numismatics.  It will be a great time!"

[I'll wholeheartedly endorse Howard's suggestion.  Interdisciplinary
encounters can have remarkable consequences on all sides.  We numismatic
bibliophiles have at our fingertips volume after volume of great
information about coinage (and history, economics and other topics),
yet people in those fields may only be aware of a small portion of
that body of work.  Similarly, archaeologists, historians and economists
may well be quite familiar with information sources that numismatic
authors have yet to find and tap into.

As one example, in the notes to Chapter 1 of "Krueger's Men", author
Lawrence Malkin cites "World War II Remembered: History in Your Hands,
A Numismatic Study" by Fred Schwan and Joe Boling.  He writes: "This
study is known to specialists; when I began my researches, it was the
first publication cited to me by William Bischoff, former curator of
the Newark (New Jersey) museum." (p214).  -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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