Coin finds from archaeological sites in Campania: a new portal for documentation and research

At the University of Salerno, the CFH (Coin Finds Hub) portal on coin finds is being set up in collaboration with several Italian and foreign institutions. In addition to describing its contents, the authors illustrate the first elements emerged from the study of coins from the excavations currently under study, the cataloguing of which will feed into the portal’s database. The sites investigated are Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, and Velia: for each of them, insights related to sample cases are presented. As is usual for those working on coins finds, the most interesting aspects concern the uses of small change, the most used and therefore lost and unrecovered, for which an extensive statistical survey is now available. The comparison of coin finds from different urban communities leads one to reason about how much and to what extent the overlapping or non-overlapping of modern cities with archaeological sites has affected the quality and quantity of numismatic data available; as also the potential for interpreting the incidence of coinage in economic activities.