This is the third volume devoted to coins in the Sardis excavations monograph series. The first volume dealt with the Byzantine coin finds from the start of the current excavations in 1958 to 1968 (G.E. Bates [1971]), the second mainly with the Greek and Roman coins to 1972 (T.V. Buttrey, A. Johnston et al. [1981]). Now in the present work E. has added a catalogue of more than 8,000 coins excavated between 1973 and 2013 from all ancient periods; but while the addition of this new material is not without value of its own, the catalogue makes up only the second half of the volume. The main achievement of the work is presented in the preceding half: two long and exceedingly detailed chapters that deal with the Sardis excavation coins in their entirety.

The first of these is an exhaustive analysis of the coins in relation to the history of Sardis as it is known from textual and archaeological sources and to the comparative record of excavated coins at other ancient urban sites in Greece and Western Asia Minor. Although the chapter is entitled ‘Excavation Coins as Evidence of the Economy and Trade’, this is somewhat misleading since trade is hardly mentioned, and economic concerns are not much in evidence prior to coin finds of the third century ad. Even so, E. demonstrates how informative on multiple levels a fresh, continuous and up-to-date survey of the Sardis coin finds can be, owing not least to the abundance of recent numismatic scholarship.

Readers expecting an extended account of early Lydian electrum will be disappointed, since the few specimens from the excavations have been discussed elsewhere. But there is plenty on Hellenistic bronze coinages, in particular a long review of the criteria for dating the beginning of Sardis’ own civic bronze. In the end, E. finds that some of the most crucial evidence is to be found in the numismatic contexts of several archaeological deposits. These imply a date in the third quarter of the third century, much earlier than had been hypothesised by previous commentators. In the Roman period when coinages can be studied with a much higher degree of chronological precision and survive in much greater numbers, E.’s chief inquiry turns to statistical quantification of annual coin loss in order to compare and explain the results from Sardis with those of eight other cities of the Roman East from the first to the seventh century. The assumption is that the levels of coin loss reflect the levels of coinage in circulation. The coins in question, however, are limited to the lower-value currency of base metal; major coins in precious metal were rarely lost.

This chapter on coins as evidence is followed by E.’s most original contribution: a chapter on the evidence of numismatically-relevant archaeological contexts. Attention to this kind of evidence from the field has certainly not been ignored in the recent literature, but to my knowledge E.’s chapter is the first to treat a site's relevant archaeological contexts together as a separate category of analysis, one in which numismatic and archaeological documentation and interests interact. Coins buried in hoards, tombs, ritual deposits and in deposits of wide-spread destruction debris provide some of the more interesting contextual discussions. But since many of the contexts consist of sequences of stratified material whose reconstructed chronologies can be dauntingly complex, it is understandable why such detailed data is normally omitted in excavation final reports. E. is justified in including a good sampling of it here because of its instructional nature: it serves to engage the reader in the realities and minutiae of interpreting coins as they are recovered in field situations.

Throughout the volume one gets a sense of E.’s personal engagement with such problems, and her desire to share it with others. Each section begins with discussions of methodology that were clearly written for readers with little or no previous experience of excavation numismatics. Unlike nearly all other numismatists who have taken on the task of publishing excavations coins, E. has had a substantial amount of experience as an excavator, which explains her more archaeologically-minded approach. But in addition, one of virtues of this work is, as noted above, its implicitly instructional value and E.’s tendency to write as a teacher.