The Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP), which seeks to create a digital repository of Roman republican coin dies based on the archive of Dr. Richard Schaefer, is excited to announce the fourth phase of work sponsored by a generous grant from the Arete Foundation. The primary goal of this final phase is to demonstrate how RRDP informs current scholarship and encourages new research collaborations. The two-year grant will fund the full-time work of the lead researcher, Dr. Alice Sharpless, on the project through the American Numismatic Society until June 2025. The Arete Foundation has provided additional funding to bring leading scholars together at a conference hosted by the American Academy in Rome (AAR) from April 9-11, 2025. The conference will culminate with an open-access volume of the Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (SMAAR).
RRDP relies on the foundational research of Schaefer, who has compiled a significant archive of over 300,000 images of Roman republican coins he identified by die. While Schaefer’s materials are now publicly available through ARCHER, the ANS’s archival database, RRDP aims to make his work accessible to researchers through a searchable, linked open data die database (RRDP) andspecimen database (SITNAM), which are in turn linked to Coins of the Roman Republic Online(CRRO). The integrated database provides an essential tool for future research, including understanding the connection between military and domestic projects and monetary production, and evaluating the accuracy of ancient sources on these subjects. The project will also facilitate further research on the scale of Roman coin production in comparison to other contemporary coinages, especially in the Greek East, and the reliability (or not) of Michael Crawford’s production estimates based on hoard counts in his well-known and standard catalog, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge, 1974).
The conference at the American Academy in Rome aims to expand the scope of the project, which has in previous phases focused on control-marked coinage and issues from the period 95-75 BCE, and to showcase potential methods of using RRDP for other scholarly research. RRDP has invited conference participants to submit requests for specific Roman republican issues to be processed: over the next sixteen months, selected issues will be transcribed and the data will be shared through the project’s databases. The conference participants will share their original research on these issues utilizing the data provided by RRDP.
A final conference program will be published in late 2024: confirmed speakers include Richard Schaefer, Seth Bernard, Andrew Burnett, Kevin Butcher, Alberto Campana, Pierluigi Debernardi, Claudia Devoto, Elizabeth Heintges, Wilhelm Hollstein, Fleur Kemmers, Roberto Lippi, Kris Lockyear, Andrew McCabe, Guillaume Méritens de Villeneuve, Charles Parisot-Sillon, Annalisa Polosa, Matthew Ponting, Mariangela Puglisi, Clare Rowan, Marleen Termeer, Lucia F. Carbone, Liv Mariah Yarrow, and Alice Sharpless. Researchers interested in receiving regular updates can contact Alice Sharpless at asharpless@numismatics.org to be added to the conference mailing list.
The American Numismatic Society, organized in 1858 and incorporated in 1865 in New York State, operates as a research museum under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is recognized as a publicly supported organization under section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) as confirmed on November 1, 1970.