Regional Science Meets the Past: What Do Coin Finds Tell Us About the Ancient Spatial Economy?

The spurt of data and organized quantitative information from different archaeological sources has challenged established truths about the ancient economy in the last three decades. The range of tools and techniques for exploiting these archaeological sources has also grown dramatically. As a result, new questions are raised, which put our sources in a broader context that increasingly favors the long-term perspective. In this paper, we discuss, using a case study, how the use of numbers can shed light in the study of ancient Roman history, with a particular interest in its economy. Our illustrative exercises focus on the use of regional science approaches, a discipline at the crossroads of economics and geography. Departing from a general equilibrium conceptual framework, we are particularly interested in Sir Alan G. Wilson’s seminal contributions as conducive to our exploration of digital numismatic databases to unravel spatial processes in the ancient world. Deriving from universal laws of physics, we will explore principles of spatial interaction modeling applied to numismatic data for the late Roman Republic that will help understand spatial interaction processes in the ancient Roman economy in the last two centuries BCE. By measuring, mapping, and modeling archaeological observations (i.e., numismatic records), we expect to make sense of patterns in the data formally and to use these insights comparatively and longitudinally, as preconized by different authors.