The production, supply and use of late Roman and early Byzantine copper coinage in the eastern empire

Major campaigns of archaeological excavations at some of the largest and most important ancient cities around the Mediterranean have produced considerable quantities of late Roman and early Byzantine coins. These coins are a critical source of evidence for the cities’ histories and their fluctuating economic fortunes, yet relatively little attention has been paid to what they can tell us about the production of coinage or the functioning of the imperial monetary economy in Late Antiquity. The vast majority of these archaeologically recovered coins, known as site finds, are low-value bronze denominations that were the small change of the Roman currency system. This article aims to examine what archaeological assemblages of coins might tell us about the monetary economies of the cities where they are found, and to investigate if it is possible to identify whether the pool of circulating copper coinage was uniform across the empire or if different places and regions had access to different forms of currency. Ultimately, the goal is to attempt the reconstruction of small change production at the imperial mints in Late Antiquity and, by looking at coins as a means of exchange in the distribution of commodities, to examine what this tells us about the nature of the monetary economy of the late Roman and early Byzantine empire