Katharina Huber

Katharina is a numismatist and historian specialising in Classical Antiquity. She holds Master’s degrees in "Ancient History and Studies in Classical Antiquity" and in "Numismatics" from the University of Vienna. In her first master’s thesis she focused on the coins minted in connection with Nero's journey to Greece, and in her second master’s thesis she analysed the nature and function of the Cistophoric coinage in the province of Asia using the example of Tralleis. Her current doctoral project "The Circulation of Roman Republican Coinage in the Imperial Period" is supervised by Bernhard Woytek. From 2016 to 2018, she was a DOC fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Research interests: numismatics and monetary history; reuse of old money, especially the coinage of the Roman Republic in the imperial period; analyses of hoards and individual finds and their historical contexts; socio-economics and metallurgy.

Current research project:
The aim of this doctoral project is to provide a numismatic analysis of the circulation of Republican coins in the imperial period, considering the historical and administrative circumstances, including the geographical and socio-cultural conditions, as well as the monetary and socio-economic prerequisites and effects. Unfortunately, the state of research on the circulation of Roman Republican coins in the imperial period is inadequate, as there are still no works devoted exclusively to this subject. However, the reuse of Roman Republican coins is an essential phenomenon of the Roman monetary economy, especially in the early and high Principate. For this reason, this work, which makes use of the entire methodological spectrum of research in the field of Ancient History, examines in particular the Republican silver denarii mainly in hoards from the reign of Augustus onwards. The influence of coinage reforms on the circulation of Republican denarii in the imperial period and the causes of the slow disappearance of the majority of pre-imperial silver coins during the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian are also analysed.

Publications:

‘Differences in the Circulation Patterns of Roman Republican Coinage in the Imperial Period with a Particular Focus on the Denarii Serrati’, Proceedings of the XVI International Numismatic Congress 2022 in Warsaw (in print).
‘Die Prägungen des Lucius Cornelius Sulla mit imperator und imperator iterum und deren Zirkulationsverhalten zu Zeiten der Republik und des Prinzipats’, Sammlungen und Sammler. Tagungsband zum 8. Österreichischen Numismatikertag, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee 2019, 141–156.
‘Vom Zentrum zum Limes. Republikanische Münzen in kaiserzeitlichen Horten’, Stabilität und Instabilität von Geldsystemen. Tagungsband zum 7. Österreichischen Numismatikertag (Wien, vom 19. – 20. Mai 2016), Vienna 2018, 17–22.