ACANS Research Activities

The Research Culture

ACANS actively promotes the numismatic research of scholars and students. Its funded senior and junior fellowships enable numismatic studies to be conducted at the Centre itself (see ACANS Fellowships).

The Gale Lectures in Ancient Numismatics

Each year a distinguished scholar is invited to deliver public lectures at Macquarie University on topics pertaining to ancient numismatics. The first were delivered by Professor Harold Mattingly in 2002. They have now been published in the Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia 14 (2003) 47-59.

Research Programs of ACANS

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Australia

ACANS administers the SNG Australia project. The secretary of the SNG Australia committee and the editor of the proposed volumes is the director of ACANS, Dr K. A. Sheedy. The project goal is to publish all ancient Greek coins in Australian public collections. Volume I, published in 2008, presented the W. L. Gale Collection of South Italian coins. Volumes II (now in preparation) will contain the combined collections of (in New South Wales) Macquarie University, the Nicholson Museum of the University of Sydney, and the Powerhouse Museum; (in Victoria) the University of Melbourne and the Museum of Victoria; (in Tasmania), the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and the University of Tasmania; and (in South Australia), the Art Gallery of South Australia and the University of Adelaide.

The SNG Australia project has been endorsed by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and by the Union Académique Internationale.

The Taranto 1911 Hoard Project

Dr K. A. Sheedy is currently working on a new publication of the 1911 Taranto Hoard (IGCH 1874). It will feature unpublished material from the holdings of the British Museum and the Athens Numismatic Museum. A special study of the ingots, to be included in the volume, is being prepared by Dr J. Kroll.

Jebel Khalid

Associate Professor Ted Nixon, Honorary Deputy Director and board member of ACANS, continues his work on the coins discovered in the Australian excavations of Jebel Khalid in Syria. Preliminary reports on this important excavation have now been published as a supplementary volume of Mediterranean Archaeology: Graeme Clarke (ed.), Jebel Khalid on the Euphrates: Report on Excavations 1986-1996. Volume I , Meditarch Suppl. 5 (2002)

Tenos Excavations

Dr Nota Kourou, the director of the University of Athens excavations on the Cycladic island of Tenos, has invited Kenneth Sheedy to participate in this project with a study of the coins.

The Early Attic Coinage Project

A new corpus and die study of archaic Athenian coinage is being prepared by Kenneth Sheedy and Gil Davis.

XRF and the Silver of Early Attic Coinage Project

This is a study of the silver employed for the minting of archaic Athenian coins.  It is being undertaken by Kenneth Sheedy and Damian Gore, with the collaboration of Gil Davis.  It is based on a program of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry (which records the emission of characteristic "secondary" or fluorescent X-rays from material that has been excited by bombardment with high-energy X-rays).  The project will be the first to employ a transportable machine for XRF analyses.  An initial fieldwork season was conducted in 2011 at the Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin with the generous assistance of Dr Bernhard Weisser.

Bara Hoard Project

In 2004 ACANS purchased the Bara Hoard, a find of some 300 coins from Bara in modern Pakistan. The aim of this project is to study and publish the coins and then eventually return the material to a suitable museum in Pakistan.

The Porinos Naos Project

A study of the earliest known temple of Apollo on Delos. Fieldwork (in conjunction with Dr Richard Anderson, American School of Classical Studies) undertaken in 2009 achieved a new architectural survey of the remaining walls. This study developed from earlier research into the early history and coinage of Delos.  It will examine the links between the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos and Apollo's Cycladic sanctuary.