ARCH Project (2018-2021)

 
THE ARCH PROJECT
 
MIB is an R&D&I project of ‘International Joint Programming’, corresponding to the State Programme of R&D&I Oriented to the Challenges of Society, within the framework of the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2017-2021 (PCI2018-092877). MIB is part of the ARCH project (2018-2021), which was approved by the Joint Programming Initiative Cultural Heritage: Digital Heritage Management Group (JPICH DHMG) in December 2017. The work of the Spanish team is carried out at the Departament de Prehistòria, Arqueologia i Història Antiga of the Universitat de València in collaboration with the Museu de Prehistòria de València of the Diputación de València. The monedaiberica (MIB) database will be integrated into the OGC (Online Greek Coinage) portal, which will function as an aggregator portal of different resources on monetary issues from the Greek world.
 
Coins are a primary source of information on the cultures that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula between the 6th and 1st centuries BC. Their issues are official documents, with a unique potential as a source of knowledge of the ancient world. Around 200 cities minted their own coins, putting into circulation more than 3000 types and variants, which used at least six different writing systems; Greek, Punic, Eastern Iberian, Southern Iberian, Sudlusitan / Tartessian and Latin. The aim of this project is to make available to society, through the freely accessible platform monedaiberica.org, an exhaustive compilation of the ancient coins of the Iberian Peninsula, articulated on the basis of a data architecture that allows simple and attractive queries.
 
The MIB project will put online a database with approximately 100,000 ancient coins minted in the Iberian Peninsula, which have appeared in trade over the last 100 years and which have been documented in Valencia over the last 30 years. The compilation of this large number of coins will be complemented by an extensive bibliography. The MIB database will allow a wide range of searches through the superior Online Greek Coinage (OGC) interface. The interconnection and merging of MIB with the platforms of the Paris (BnF) and Oxford (Ashmolean Museum) collections will provide a trilingual interface for data search and presentation.
 
The aim of this project is to organise the monetary production of the ancient cities of the Iberian Peninsula between the 6th and 1st centuries BC, in order to offer a historical, economic, political, archaeological, epigraphic, artistic, patrimonial and numismatic vision. The materials will be described and grouped by issuing cities and within these by types, which in turn will sometimes have sub-variants. Monetary types will be defined by their formal characteristics, metals, designs, legends and physical parameters (modulus and weight), and will be dated according to available information derived from treasures and archaeological contexts. In addition, the digital photography revolution makes it possible to document the material with a level of detail that has not yet been exploited at the academic level. In other words, it aims to provide complete and comprehensive information on the ancient coinage of Iberia / Hispania-Galia.
 
Given that coins were a mass-produced handcrafted product, they offer numerous variables and magnitudes that can be quantified and analysed for research using advanced statistical techniques; weight, diameter, position of dies, metallic composition data, denominations, issue volume, designs, circulation and finds. One of the objectives of this project is to make available to historians, linguists, economists, museum curators, archaeologists, collectors and the general public interested in Antiquity, a complete study which, through a portal, provides the tools for consultation and analysis of ancient coins minted in the Iberian Peninsula.
 
 
TEAM

The MIB project is being developed in Valencia, within two leading institutions in numismatic research.

For more than 30 years, the Universitat de València has been the most important research centre on the ancient coinages of the Iberian Peninsula.This work has been led by Professor Pere Pau Ripollès, a renowned researcher in relation to the ancient coinages of the Iberian Peninsula, with  an extensive curriculum and international prestige, since he is currently Vice President of the International Council of Numismatics. His participation in the Online Greek Coinage (OGC) project provides him with additional experience in the framework of international pioneering initiatives in relation to the systematization of the ancient coinages online.

The Museu de Prehistòria de València has been working for years in collaboration with the Universitat de València and has extensive experience in the design of humanities databases, specifically for the management of digital collections and their online publication.The curator Manuel Gozalbes Fernández de Palencia is the creator and responsible of the 50 data tables that the Museum employs for the daily management of the collections, that currently exceed 300.000 records. He is also responsible for the website of the museum whose contents are generated directly from these internal data tables. His long career as a researcher on the ancient coinages of the Iberian Peninsula provides the knowledge and perspective necessary for the challenge of this digital data base project.

RESEARCHERS

Manuel Gozalbes: Curator at the Museu de Prehistòria de Valencia. He has worked for several years in collaboration with the University of Valencia and has a long experience building heritage databases, specifically for the management of archaeological collections and their publication online. He manages the Museum’s database (currently more than 500,000 records), and is coordinator for its website, whose contents are directly generated from the internal data management system. His research focuses on the ancient coinage of the Iberian Peninsula.

Carlos Gómez Bellard: Professor of Archaeology, at the Universitat de València. His research focuses on the Phoenician-Punic world, especially the Punic cities in the western Mediterranean. He will contextualize monetary production within the civic/ethnic framework, providing detailed accounts of the coinage of the Punic cities, particularly from the religious and iconographic standpoint. He has led international research projects in collaboration with the Universities of Glasgow (UK) and Brown (USA).
Consuelo Mata-Parreño is Professor of Archaeology at the Universitat de València. She specialises inthe economic, ecological and social and gender-related aspects of the Iberian Iron Age. She will provide cultural and social context for the coinage, as well as archaeological context for dating the issues and coin circulation.
Agustín Diez Castillo: Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Universitat de Valencia; he is an expert in the use of GIS technologies, as well as in the adoption of the production economy in the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age. He will focus on the implementation of statistical analytical tools, as well as the GIS protocol for study of spatial relations of cities and objects, find-spots and hoards.