Purpose of the Project DiviSeries

The DiviSeries project, presented here, is a study on some 3,000 restitution antoninians organized within a database. The targets of this research are:

Create the catalog of dies for this series.

Calculate the total number of original dies in the series and from this, estimate its total volume.

Determine the chains of die-links that will give us an approximation to the production process.

Link the hybrid coins of our series with other contemporary coins to confirm the chronology traditionally attributed to the DiviSeries.

Propose analytical methods that can be applied to other series of ancient coins.

In a future second phase of this research, coins of certain dies will be studied to observe breakages and progressive wear of the die, and thus try to obtain information about the functioning of the mint and the production process.

Due to the large volume of coins and information involved, it has been necessary to create custom software for the construction of the die-link trees. Each time a new coin is registered, its dies are identified and the new information is linked to the die tree automatically.

We are facing a project that has an empirical base that is constantly increasing and updating, organized in a database. The inclusion of new coins in the registry is constant, having already reached a volume of data that means that the estimates on the number of dies do not vary significantly with the new contributions.

All data from this research are public and available to anyone interested in the topic. The software and methodology are also available to any researcher who needs it to apply it to any other monetary series, in an analogous way to how I have adapted it to the double sesterces and aureus of Trajan Decius. Just state that a certain computer skill is necessary to adapt it to other series, however you can count on my support in your project.

I will also appreciate comments and communication of errors, of which this work is surely not exempt.