ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

Debasement of Roman Silver coinage

Abstract: The quality of ancient silver coinage is often seen as a comment on the fiscal health of the issuing states. This is nowhere more apparent than with Roman coinages, which witnessed debasements during the first three centuries of our era. Most Roman silver coins were produced from an alloy of Ag and Cu. This enabled Roman mints to disguise debasements from the general public by exploiting the dissimilarity between the electrode potentials of the two metals.The blanks for the coins were cast, and they were kept or reheated at red heat to oxidise the copper at the surfaces of the blanks. The copper could then be stripped out of the alloy by soaking in an acid. This left a honeycomb structure of nearly pure silver at the surface of the blanks. We proposed to apply Neutron Tomography on IMAT in order to visualise in 3D the presence of the Ag layer arising from Cu depletion.

Principal Investigator: Professor Kevin Butcher
Experimenter: Dr Adrian Hillier
Experimenter: Dr Katsuhiko Ishida
Experimenter: Dr Anna Fedrigo
Experimenter: Miss Bethany Hampshire
Local Contact: Dr Antonella Scherillo

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2000277

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2000277

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
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Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Professor Kevin Butcher et al; (2021): Debasement of Roman Silver coinage, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2000277

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.