Greetings! I’d like to share the good news that I am giving a lecture on my dissertation work/monograph-in-progress on Tuesday, November 17th, at 5:30 EST. The lecture is open to the public via Zoom. Please find the relevant information below! I hope to see you there. Thanks to Professors Aleydis Van de Moortel and Stephen Collins-Elliott for their gracious invitation to speak.
2020 Distinguished Haines-Morris Lecture
Department of Classics
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
A Dialogue in Metal: Silver, Bronze, and Cross-Cultural Currencies in Italy and Sicily
Giuseppe Carlo Castellano II (UT Austin)
Tues., Nov. 17, 2020
5:30 pm EST
This online lecture is open to the public via Zoom.
Register at: https://tiny.utk.edu/hm2020-castellano
When the Greeks arrived in Sicily and Tyrrhenian Italy in the eighth century BC, during their period of explosive migration across the Mediterranean world, they found the native peoples using bronze objects by weight as a form of (pre-coinage) premonetary currency. These bronze objects, tools, and ingots were reckoned against a native Italic libral pound (Greek, litra). The Greeks in Sicily adopted this indigenous bronze standard, which had an enormous impact on the monetization of Italy and Sicily.
The monetization of Sicily and Italy was thus marked by a persistent indigenous influence and by a critical adoption of coinage by the native peoples. This project addresses cultural identity and interaction in areas of contact between Greeks and indigenous Sicilian and Italic peoples through the lens of monetary practice, tracing the native influence on coinage through close study of technical aspects. These include weight standards, technique of manufacture, and metallic preference. These technical aspects, as the products of unspoken or even unconscious cultural habits, are excellent quantitative indicators of cultural influence. My results indicate a much stronger indigenous influence on the monetization of ancient Sicily and Italy than previously recognized.