BIO

Shane McCord is a junior classical archaeology major in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is from Ocala, Florida, and has had a vested interest in and passion for all things history—and archaeology-related since a young age. His current areas of interest relate to the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Roman archaeology and history, and he has goals to continue this field of study into graduate school and beyond. Shane hopes to obtain his PhD in classical archaeology and become a full-fledged professor. Other interests include numismatics, ancient and medieval art, and architecture.

Analyzing 3rd Century C.E. Coins at the Archaeological Site of Cosa

Abstract

The site of Cosa on the Tuscan coast, Northwest of Rome, is one of the most important and representative locations in the corpus of American study and activity in Roman archaeology. The colony of Cosa, which has experienced intermittent excavation campaigns since 1948, is the focus of a research project conducted with doctoral student Melissa Ludke. Her project organized and inventoried the coins discovered during these excavations and acted as the basis for this investigation. Moreover, this poster displays and analyzes third-century coins from this catalog, utilizing mapping technologies to create a map that assists in contextualizing certain regions of the site and provides a deeper understanding of the city’s inhabitation and activity during the third century CE. The significance of the spatial relationships between the find locations of the coins and the larger city plan and the urban landscape can bring to light potential areas of the town that were in use during this period and introduce a perspective that has seen little focus in the scholarship of Cosa until recently. Thus, modern software, such as AutoCAD, allows the find spots to be tied to actual geophysical data and offers a method to create an accurate overall site map for plotting coins.

Keywords: Roman, Archaeology, Coins, Cosa, Classics