Teaching with Coins: Coins as Tools for Thinking about the Ancient World

This paper examines the potential of coins for teaching about federalism in undergraduate ancient Greek history courses. The koinon, or ‘federal state,’ was a ubiquitous state structure of Greek history, which has received much scholarly attention recently (e.g., Beck and Funke; Mackil). However, despite the ubiquity of Greek federal states, they play a small or nonexistent role in most ancient Greek history courses at the undergraduate level.

Courses of numismatics are almost nonexistent in North American university curricula. Coins are shown in courses of classical art and history especially as illustrations of the iconography of statue types, of monuments and of the portraits of ancient rulers, but little attention is paid to the technical aspects of coin production and to the purchasing power of the denominations. Several North American University Museums own coin collections, which are also used as a teaching tool, but in the majority of cases students do not have direct access to the artifacts.

In 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opened the first gallery devoted to ancient Greek and Roman coinage in a US art museum. Given its location within a public institution, the gallery, known as the Michael C. Ruettgers Ancient Coin Gallery (“coin gallery” for short), treats the general public as its student population, welcoming those as young schoolchildren and high school students all the way up to learned scholars.

This talk will share the successes and challenges of an educational program that introduces ancient Greece to students in grades 5-8 through connecting ancient, modern, and fictional coins from a familiar story: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan 2005). The program is freely available as an online resource, making it accessible, replicable, and adaptable for use in museums, academic institutions, and excavations worldwide.

Since 2015, the student-run, digital humanities project “From Stone to Screen” has been developing open-access teaching modules for the Roman coin collection housed in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious studies at the University of British Columbia. Designed by students for students, these modules allow students to familiarize themselves with numismatic conventions, online resources, and methodologies through peer-teaching. Students worked closely with faculty in order to situate these modules within current teaching practice.