Although several books outline the role of coins in classical archaeology, and many cover pottery and other artefacts in historical archaeology, this volume is the first to give serious consideration to coins and their close cousins, tokens and medals, in the context of North American historical archaeology.
This very important class of artefact occurs more rarely than ceramics or objects such as nails yet has disproportionate significance. No other class of artefact is so explicitly enmeshed in economic relations, and few provide better chronological control. Coins and tokens provide rich evidence of foreign relations, political sentiments, views of vanished buildings or ships, and otherwise unknown commercial enterprises. Medals, although found less frequently, provide similar evidence, but also sometimes record individual accomplishments or events. Yet, with all these advantages, numismatics has suffered much neglect and some misunderstanding by North American historical archaeologists. That is largely because it is almost never part of their training.
This book attempts to address that failing. It devotes many pages to the character of money in colonial and post-colonial North America, quite rightly contrasting the economies and uses of money in the Old and New Worlds, and attributing their difference to the fact that colonial powers had little interest in the economic welfare of colonists, let alone indigenous people, but only in extracting wealth. This typically caused chronic coin shortages in colonies and frontier zones that local people remedied as best they could. One expedient that the book neglects is the manipulation of exchange rates; even when home countries shipped coins to their colonies, these were shipped right back again to pay for goods, services and taxes, so colonial governments rated coins not at their European or bullion values, but at higher values locally in an attempt to discourage their re-export (see McCullough Reference McCullough1984). In British colonies, for example, Halifax Currency valued the Spanish ‘dollar’ at 5 shillings, local currency, at a time when it was rated 4s 6d in England. York Currency, originating in colonial New York, overvalued even more, setting the dollar at 8s. It is also not really true that British colonies “were usually bound by law to use British money” (p. 46)—actual shillings were not particularly common in circulation—only that pounds, shillings and pence should be the ‘money of account’ even as Spanish dollars were usually the de facto standard of exchange. What actually circulated was a bewildering array of coins, private tokens, paper scrip and coin-like items, even including brass buttons and (contra the statement on p. 46) occasional ancient Greek and Roman coins (Gibb Reference Gibb1874). Governments routinely issued edicts illustrating or listing the foreign coins considered acceptable for payments and their exchange rates. Overall, this section of the book is excellent, although it would have benefited from mentioning one of the home governments’ main incentives for monopolising the issue of coins: coining was a way to regulate and tax bullion. The British Royal Mint, for example, struck gold and silver coins almost only when citizens brought precious metal to them, with the government profiting by the difference, or ‘seignorage’, between the nominal value of the coin and the value of the metal in it. As governments made little profit from low-value copper coins, they had little interest in issuing them, leading private persons to fill the gap with their own tokens and counterfeit halfpennies, a practice that governments periodically squashed. The new US Mint, from the 1790s, was innovative in trying, however unsuccessfully, to meet the economic needs of citizens.
As we would expect, the discussion commences with the important Spanish-American coinage, which was the basis for almost all later money in North America. It then focuses on Anglo-American colonies and especially the United States, while giving fair, if abridged, coverage to Canada and Mexico, but neglecting Russian Alaska. To their credit, the authors devote an entire chapter to Asian coins, which were much more important in North America than most archaeologists realise, especially on the west coast and in Sino-American communities.
Chapter 5 covers tokens and medals. The former, which include private halfpennies, merchants' tokens or ‘store cards’, gambling tokens, ferry tokens and many other non-coin circulating and advertising pieces, are particularly important archaeologically, but medals, such as military, school and sports awards, do sometimes turn up in archaeological contexts. Not surprisingly, tokens were abundant when official coins were scarce, and there are so many kinds that the authors can only attempt an overview. This they accomplish quite well, although one might have hoped that their excellent coverage of the categories of tokens would include at least a few non-US examples, as the sections on Canadian and Mexican tokens are brief and most of the categories would be the same. One might also have expected a paragraph or two on the rare but archaeologically important so-called ‘Indian Chief’ or ‘Peace’ medals, which were gifts from colonial powers to allied indigenous leaders; these receive only brief mention in a discussion of wampum.
There is a short chapter on paper money, which is rarely preserved archaeologically, but the authors include it for completeness and because it does occasionally survive in excavated contexts.
Subsequent chapters introduce the technology of coin production and deal with practical, ethical and theoretical concerns, such as numismatic conservation, identification and documentation, and archaeological interpretation of coin finds and treasure from shipwrecks. Among their strengths is attention to the similarities and differences between numismatic and archaeological analyses. The authors introduce the important tools of numismatic relative dating (e.g. die-linking) and hoard analysis. Commendably, they point out that archaeologists should not uncritically accept a date on a coin or token as its date of issue, let alone that it has a close relationship to the date of a deposit. They might, however, have placed more emphasis on the chronological pitfalls; not only did some coins, as they point out, keep the same date for many decades, some tokens show the date of a firm's founding or were even intentionally misdated to evade counterfeiting laws.
Chapter 10 provides an excellent overview of the kinds of research that numismatic archaeology can further, while also pointing out that coins, tokens and medals are not only evidence for the economy, they are also documents that provide insights into social and political conditions. Chapter 11 covers the special case of coins from shipwrecks, their many technical, legal and ethical problems, and their great research potential. Other chapters deal with conservation, identification and photography, and the ethical issues surrounding the relationship between archaeologists and collectors, with examples of productive collaboration. A useful glossary of numismatic terms and a fairly thorough bibliography conclude the book.
This is an extremely welcome contribution that should be in every historical archaeologist's library.
