Purpose

Introduction

The "Divi Series" project, introduced here, is a study of over 2000 restitution series antoniniani organized within a database. The objectives of this research are to:

Elaborate the catalog of dies for this series.

Calculate the total number of original dies and from that, to estimate the total volume of the mint’s production.

Determine the die-link chains which will allow us to recreate production sequences and arrange the dies in chronological order.

Link the hybrid coins from our series with other contemporary coins and other historical evidence to confirm the chronology traditionally attributed to the "Divi Series".

Propose analytical methods that could be applied to other analogous coin series.

In a future second phase of this research, coins of specific dies will be organized, based on die wear, to follow the dies from their initial unworn state and through each stage of wear and thereby shedding light on the inner workings of the mint.

Because of the large volume of information involved, it has been necessary to write a custom software program to build the die-link trees. Every time a new coin is registered and its dies identified, the new information must be linked into the die-link tree.

Each inclusion of a new coin to the registry is permanent, and the process of updating the database will continue beyond the publication of this present report. The results published here, already showing a high degree of reliability, will only improve as progressively more coins are registered.