James Collings
History Major and Nexus in Public History, Museums, Archives
Why Coins Give Me Nightmares
I was given the opportunity to intern at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum this summer and largely worked with the ethnographic collections. My main project was looking at part of the coin collection, which is largely made of Greco-Roman coins and updating records for coins that had incomplete or missing information. As I had little prior experience looking at coins, I had to figure out how to quickly find accurate information on coins that might be worn or illegible, that are labeled as fake, or that just don’t exist in online databases. This presentation centers largely around the methodology of determining the background of a coin. Though most of the collection is made of coins from Greece and Rome, I will also talk a little about medieval coins from Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire and the historical context in which to place these coins.