Coinage of Roman Republic Online aids numismatic research

The American Numismatic Society, in collaboration with the British Museum and the Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, has launched another major tool to aid in the identification, research and cataloging of the coins of the ancient world.

Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) continues the precedent set by Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) in presenting, in an easily searchable form, all the varieties of the coinage issued in the Roman Republic. Six online collections containing over 20,000 specimens of Roman Republican coinage spread across 2,300 coin types, in addition to hundreds of hoards from Coin Hoard of the Roman Republic (CHRR) and additional individual find spots provided by Berlin are now available for research.

The site presents a basic description of each published variety based on Michael Crawford’s 1974 publication Roman Republican Coinage, which remains the primary typology used for the identification of Roman Republican coin types.

ANS database developer, Ethan Gruber, says that, “like OCRE and all of our other digital projects at the ANS, CRRO uses Linked Open Data methodologies to aggregate information from disparate institutions and present the information in an interface available in more than 10 languages with advanced mapping and metrical analysis features. CRRO is a fully functional research portal for Roman Republican numismatics.”