The incuse staters of Kroton

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A detailed study of the Kro toniate incuses has long been a desideratum. Principally the aim of this thesis is to group the incuse staters of Kroton into some recognisable order and to offer a chronology for those groups that is more precise than dates hitherto offered in current literature (for example, recently published coin catalogues of public and private collections can do no better than date the entire incuse coinage to two eras; pre-510 and 510-450BC - SNG VI, Oxford, 1972). While undertaking the task it soon became evident that theories which were developed from the data needed to be tested for viability. This is the purpose, in chapter 3, of the study and subsequent re-classification of Sydney Noe's 1927 publication of the Metapontion incuses, and, in chapter 2, of the computer analysis of the Krotoniate incuses in particular. With the aid of this extensive computer analysis, and with accompanying tables and figures, I have endeavoured to show that a fairly precise dating for certain coin groups can be arrived at - far more precise than a (nevertheless mandatory) study of hoards or the historic literature alone can achieve. In fact, it has been possible from this study to offer more probable estimates for some hoard dates and to hypothesize with some authority coin issues associated with certain known historical events. Further expansion of the initial aim became necessary in order to explain certain phenomena observed in the Krotoniate incuse coin data; namely, those related to the production of coins in antiquity. Two technical excurses are devoted to these problems.

An historical summary is mandatory, after which a detailed survey of the incuse staters of Kroton, together with the computer analysis, follows. Then, in the penultimate chapter, the historic and numismatic evidence is melded to obtain reasonably precise dating of most coin groups. The last chapter attempts to make some numismatic sense of the period between the last incuses and the relatively prolific new double-relief coinage of Kroton1s final era.