A Catalogue of Coin Hoards and the Shelf Life of Coins in Palestine Hoards During the Roman-Byzantine Period

This study presents a corpus of the coin hoards found in Israel, dating to the Roman and Byzantine periods. In this study we investigated data relating to the shelf life of coins in Roman and Byzantine hoards found in Israel. It is commonly accepted that coins were in circulation for more than ‘a few years’. However most of the hoards in our sample contained a relatively large amount of late coins. We can therefore argue that, from the hoards examined it appears that people seemed to use coins that were minted during the last ‘generation’. Hence, it can be said that even though the maximum time span of coins in hoards is around 250 years, and although the average median is about 50 years, it nevertheless appears that most of the coins in hoards are, in fact, from the last 25 years prior to concealment.