The army of Mu’awiya, frustrated by the fortification walls built by Byzantine emperors to protect the city of Caesarea Maritima, finally took the city by stealth, in the year we reckon 640 or 641 C.E. It seems that Caesarea was not destroyed by the invaders – it was far too large a city and the Muslim army was too small to wreak much havoc. But the city began a slide into obscurity, as people left and buildings and neighborhoods were abandoned. Roman and Byzantine Caesarea became a quarry for the Muslim builders, or raw materials for fertilizer and mortar. Yet in...

Just over 8,000 coins were found in the Joint Expeditions to Caesarea Maritima excavations, of which about 2,700 were datable to some degree to the years 350 B.C.E to about 640 C.E. In addition, 129 Arabic, 15 Crusader, 70 blanks, and approximately 5100 “nils,” or coins that were completely unrecoverable were noted in the inventories. Of all the coins I studied, almost all were bronzes; one was silver and two were gold (50, 899, 2215; see also Appendix 1 on the gold hoard). My study concerns the coins from the last three centuries B.C.E. through the seventh century C.E.¹

Coins...

The huge majority of coins found in any excavation are bronze, just as in Caesarea.¹ Lists of excavation coins are dutifully published by numismatists, but it has been left to archaeologists/numismatists in Britain and Germany to theorize what these coins can tell us about the site. It is this theory that seeks to answer what light excavated bronze coins shed on the ancient economy or trade. What Richard Reece and John Casey, in particular, have tried to establish is a “normal” profile of a site, based on the bronze coins found there.² These profiles are then used to find “normal”...

The second line of the catalogue entry reads: metal, denomination (if known), weight in grams, diameter in mm, inventory number, locus (beginning with the letter L). An asterisk after the weight means that the coin was fragmentary, halved or pierced (asterisks are also used in the description to denote stars in the types). The inventory number shows the Year. Field. Area. Bucket. Field number. Unknown field is marked ‘X’; unknown area or bucket is marked ‘0.’ The full locus should be obtained by ascertaining the Field and Area number (e.g., the locus for coin one is G.18 000); ‘000’ means...