07 February 2023 : Dr. Aleksandar Brzic
Coins and what NOT to do with them – in Archaeology and at home…
Nearly all archaeological sites dating from ca. 650 B.C. to the most modern ones will yield some coins. Sometimes only a couple of lost pieces, but sometimes buckets full of silver or gold. How does the Archaeology deal with them? What do the Archaeologists do with these coins and what are they used for?
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In this lecture, we will be concerned with some practical questions of this process: can you just dig them up and take them home? In Portugal? In UK? In other countries? Whose possession are they actually and why? In recent years, particularly fired up by the wars in the Middle East and the destiny of many cultural artefacts during these times, the discussion about such questions had sometimes reached dimensions and passions hitherto very foreign to the normal scientific dispute. We will look into the example of the UK Portable Antiquity Scheme and contrasting laws in Portugal and Germany and let you draw your own conclusions. |
The second part of the presentation is concerned about the coins at home: you have some somewhere in a drawer, you inherited some or would like to sell them or donate them to a museum but have no idea how to deal with them or what they are worth.
While not pretending to give an exhaustive advice for every individual situation, we will present here some general principles and also concrete recommendations about how to deal with such situations and prevent people from doing wrong things and regretting it afterwards.
Dr. Aleksandar Brzic has been born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, and resides in Algarve since 2019. He retired here after a career in IT Management and now finally can dedicate his free time to the passion he held since being a teenager: coins. He holds a doctorate in Economic History and is active as independent scholar in the field of Numismatics. He specializes in the history of gold coinage and has recently published about the use of gold coinage in jewelry in different countries of Europe. He has been a member of the Archaeological Association of the Algarve since 2019 and is currently the editor of the Newsletter of the AAA.
