Long Table 271. Filling in the Blanks: Increasing the Representation of Late Antique and Early Medieval Coin Finds from Greece and Turkey in the FLAME database

April 21, 2026
1:00 PM ET

Princeton University’s FLAME project tracks coin minting and finds from 325 to 750 CE to provide data on the monetary changes from Constantine’s coin reforms to the establishment of Islamic coinage. In the course of examining the distribution of the over 11,000 coin finds from western Eurasia in our online database, we observed that finds from modern Greece and Turkey, which constituted the Byzantine heartland, are far less well represented than regions on the fringe of the empire.  The project has given stipends to two graduate students at Greek universities and two at Turkish universities to spend the past year investigating this phenomenon and formulating strategies to ameliorate the disparities. These students (Didem Dursun of Akdeniz University, Rumeysa Olutasof Ankara University, Dikaios Panteleakis of the University of Crete, and Garyfallia Prifti of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), along with the project chairman Alan Stahl and data specialist Ilia Curto Pelle, will be visiting the ANS on Friday, April 24, to share their results.