The students were still able to get hands-on experience, though, when they practiced cleaning ancient Roman coins from private collections. Using soft sticks, cotton, and cleaning solution, the students tried their hands at clearing away dirt and wear to discover the ancient images emblazoned on the coins.
“This is something I always wanted to do as a kid,” said Aspen Matosky, a first year Classics major. “I've always wanted to work with stuff like this, and now I'm getting the opportunity to. There wasn't really a lot of opportunities like this at my high school, but I'm a first year in this class, and I get to do stuff that I dreamed of doing.”
“Coins from the Roman Republic have all kinds of information about family, history, historical events, some even have things that would have been used in religious rituals and daily life,” said Rowan Michael-Manzer, a junior Classics major and Religious Studies minor. “It’s all on there and it's so exciting to look at.”
Each student also completed an undergraduate research project analyzing a particular coin or images found on the coins from the Cetamura hoard and presented their research at the spring Undergraduate Research Symposium. Matosky focused her research on a coin that featured the image of a deity that most researchers believed to be Apollo. “I disagree with that,” Matoksy said. The deity is featured with a lightning bolt, an image typically associated with Jupiter or Zeus. “But it’s not how Zeus appears. So, the conversation opens up. What other deities feature lightning bolts besides Jupiter? And what other deities could it be? The Romans love to absorb other people's cultures and religion. Did they maybe get the idea from neighboring culture that they absorbed into their own?”
For her project, Michael-Manzer studied coins with images of animals on them. “The animals can be clues as to who the god is on the front of the coin. They can represent a city, the Empire, or a part of the daily life of the Republic at that point. Sometimes they represent something about people, such as a family emblem,” Michael-Manzer explained.
“I have one with a scorpion on it, and I had figure out what that meant. Scorpions are often connected to Mars and Romulus, so is that supposed to suggest that they are on this coin? I had to ask, is this a reference to possibly biological warfare using scorpions? That happened a lot in the ancient world,” Michael-Manzer continued. “Or maybe it’s a reference to a very famous poisoner, Mithradates the Poison King?”
It takes a lot of research and creativity to piece the stories of the coins together. “In Classics you don't always have much evidence to work with, so you have to really understand what you have, and what the implications of what you have are,” said Robin Reams, a first-year history and Classics major. “And then you can form a narrative.”
In addition to these projects, the class is also working on developing posters for an exhibit that will preview a new museum in Italy, which will house many of the discoveries from the Cetamura del Chianti site, including the coins. The posters will cover topics such as the legionary soldier at the time of Augustus, and objects found at Cetamura del Chianti that a veteran may have owned, such as a bronze fibula for fastening a cloak, bronze buckets, luxury glass, and a phallic amulet that a soldier might wear for protection.
“This is community engaged learning that they're doing, but it's for an Italian community,” Holland Goldthwaite said. “It’s really wonderful to have an international aspect to this work.”
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