SZ. BURGER ALICE: LATE ROMAN MONEY CIRCULATION IN SOUTH-PANNONIA / Régészeti Füzetek II/22. (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Budapest, 1981

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Computers - a wonderful invention of our times - have become indispensable tools not only of the decision making in the administrative and technological aspects of the economy and of the basic researches of the medical and natural sciences but have spread ground even at the facilitation of the work in museums. The central field of their applications is the inventories, the administration of the objects stored in the museums and their quick, correct and authentic information retrieval. * I have learnt about computer aided evaluation concerning my field of research only after publishing a study at 1978 about the coinage from Wessling. ^ My investigations are the first experiments in Hungary on this field, and deal with numismatical data. Márkus András, who is a matematician by profession and has made the computer programs could not use any prefabricated model, for even the paper written by Reece had not been known by us before the solution of our problem. ^ No survey of the four centuries long history of the money circulation in Pannónia has been written yet. Particular aspects of specific periods and groups of coinage have been investigated by several researchers. ^ Our investigations have several aspects and deal with the coinage found at sites of different types within a limited territory and time intervall. The territory lies within the recent administrative borders of the counties Baranya, Tolna and Somogy. The territory includes a g-eat part of southern Valeria and a stretch of the limes as well. Due to the fact that the computer aided evaluation requires the uniformity of the identification of the coins I was forced to be limited to my own research field. ^ I am convinced that for the new or unpublished findings it is no worth to make efforts to be exhaustive. The available coinage counts near 20000 coins and the phenomena which have become known by the investigations are only the basic ones and are subject of changes following the changing of the amount of the coinage. As an experiment, the investigations include the analysis of hoards found in the barbaricum as well. The hoards have been included deliberately, in order to be able to analyse the interconnections and differences. When deciding about the time limits I have choosen the simplest copper coins of the fourth century, partly for the researchers have dealt with the problems of minting of precious metal several times already,*

3 and on the other hand the everyday life of the Roman times is reflected best by the facts concerning copper coins. ^ I have dealt with the disproportionateness I have detected in the literature written either in Hungary or abroad in favour of the works on Valentinian I (A.D. 364 - 375) and his period against Constantine I (A.D. 3o6 - 364) and his successors. Light has been thrown on the fact that the four decades between 324 and 364 are a really exciting but till now inexplicably neglected period of the history. Finally it is a not negligible fact that till now the research has not dealt with this period and its relations systematically. The various information obtained by the analysis have incited me to deal with the problems of the disproportion found between the mints and the revision of the theory of the nearby mints. With some technical differences between the mints only the same methods have been used to investigate the circulation of money is Southern Pannónia in the period between 324 and 378. The groups are: hoards 15 289 coins, towns and settlements 1 585 coins, cemeteries, graves 1 39

0 coins, 18 264 coins all together. The data processing has been made on the CDC 3300 computer of the Hungarian Academy of Science s. In my opinion the main lesson of our working together is that the results ohtained independently by different methods of the different disciplines have supported, reinforced and completed each other. At the beginning of our work we have not known the scope and efficiency of the approach, we have had no expectations about the results. It was exciting to listen to the coming up of new relationships, regularities generated automatically on the basis of the stored data only and to include these facts into the historical and economical research. I should like to emphasize that the evaluations published now are considered as partial results only, but the experiments revealed that the computer aided processing of numismatical and archeological data has great capabilities. The application of computers in the cases where this method is an alternative of the traditional methods yields a preliminary test of the usage of computers in the 5