THE GRADUATE SEMINAR

The forty-fourth Graduate Seminar in Numismatics was held at the museum from June 11 to August 10, 1996. This year's visiting scholar was Andrea Saccocci, Professor at the University of Padua. Saccocci, who was joined by his wife and daughter late in the summer, delivered three lectures and assisted in supervising the work of the students. He also was the July speaker at the New York Numismatic Club.

This year's outside speakers included Ben Lee Damsky, Belmont, CA; Sarah E. Cox, Columbia University; Fred S. Kleiner, Boston University; Eric P. Newman, St. Louis; and Stephen K. Scher, Clifton, NJ. They addressed various topics not covered by staff members.

This year's students, with their affiliations and titles, were Julian R. Baker, University of Birmingham, "Three Hoards of Deniers Tournois from Frankish Greece and Their Contribution to the Study of Coinage of Southern Greece and the Peloponnese in the Late 13th and Early 14th Centuries"; Chandreyi Basu, University of Pennsylvania, "Re-examining the Coinage of Taxila (2nd Century B.C.-1st Century A.D.): A Study of Regional Mint Organization"; Harry Bone, Princeton University, "The Post-Reform Copper Coinage of Ummayad Damascus"; Alexis Q. Castor, Bryn Mawr College, "Eustephanos: The Well-Crowned Goddess on Greek Coins"; James F. D. Frakes, Columbia University, "Chronology and the Gallic Silver of the Rhone Valley"; Tricia Halpin, Boston College, "Pennies from Heaven: The Role of Money and Anglo-Saxon Pilgrimage"; Eric J. Hanne, University of Michigan, "'The Powers That Be': Twelfth-Century Gold Coinage from the Central Islamic Lands"; Marilyn Higbee, Columbia University, "Annulet and Decoration Patterns in the Silver Coinage of the Independent Emirate of Umayyad Spain"; Paul Legutko, University of Michigan, "The Revolt of Macrianus and Quietus and Its Effect on Alexandrian Coinage, A.D. 260-263"; Isabelle Pafford, San Francisco State University, "Megara: The Hellenistic Coinage, a Preliminary Study"; and Robert Papp, Columbia University, "The Road to Chevonets: The Representation of National Identity in Russian Money, 1896-1924."


The Archer M. Huntington Medal Award


On Saturday March 16, 1996, the Archer M. Huntington Medal Award for 1996 was presented to Theodore V. Buttrey, Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Keeper of Coins at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. The award is given in recognition of outstanding achievement in numismatic scholarship.

Mark Salton, the Chairman of the Huntington Medal Award Committee read the following citation:

"Today we honor a numismatist whose dedication to the science has spanned more than four decades and continues undiminished. The poet Robert Herrick wrote some 300 years ago 'Attempt the end and never stand to doubt, Nothing's so hard but research will find it out.' If we were looking for scholars in our time for whom those lines might have been intended, among the first to come to mind would be today's medalist.

"Theodore Buttrey's academic achievements are outstanding. Among them, he was first Professor and then Chairman of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, 1964-68; elected Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, 1972; Keeper of the Coins, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1988-91; Fulbright Professor at Copenhagen University, 1985; Medalist of the Royal Numismatic Society, 1983; and President of the Royal Numismatic Society, 1989-94, no mean achievement for an American.

"His numismatic career began in 1952 with his participation in the ANS Graduate Seminar, and since then he has shown on many occasions how research, if persistent and thorough, can uncover new insights even where problems appear forbiddingly thorny. The bibliography of his activity bears this out. It is too extensive to be recited here in its entirety, but several of his most significant writings should be mentioned: The Triumviral Portrait Gold of the Quattuorviri Monetales of 42 B.C. (ANSNNM 137, 1956) which shows the analytical skill of the writer, shedding a clear light on the hitherto only vaguely understood question of the moneyers' college of that year with conclusions based on meticulous die studies, and each step in the reasoning carefully backed by supporting evidence; 'Chronology of the Flavian Titulature' (1980) followed by 'Flavian Numismatic Titulature,' RNS Presidential Address (1990); work in collaboration with Ian Carradice on a review of RIC 2 concerning Flavian emperors; 'Morgantina Studies, the Coins,' Numismatic Chronicle (1973) and Princeton (1989); 'The Denarii of Pescennius Niger,' RNS Presidential Address (1992) where he identified no less than 50 Niger obverse legends; and, not to go unmentioned, numerous hoard reports, excavation records, and reviews. Forthcoming studies include a corpus of the coinage of Pescennius Niger, a work on the denarii of Publius Crepusius proceeding jointly with Giles Carter and Charles Hersh, and a study on Pharaonic imitations of Athenian tetradrachms.

"It is evident that Roman numismatics in all its aspects is a focal point of his interests. On the other hand, his scientific inquiry has by no means been limited to the classical period. A large body of his work is devoted to Mexican numismatics, as is borne out by numerous essays, papers, and publications, both in English and in Spanish examining many facets of the coinages of our neighbor to the south. They include: The Guide Book of Mexican Coins, first published in 1969, followed by repeated updated editions, the sixth together with Clyde Hubbard in 1992; 'Central America under the Mexican Empire, 1822-1823,' ANSMN 13 (1967); a number of papers on coinages of the Zapata uprising; and numerous others as well.

"As if all this would not suffice, Theodore Buttrey also is the author of articles on numismatics and archaeology intended for the general public, thus reaching out to a wider audience. In this endeavor he has conducted numerous television programs on classical subjects including coinage.

"His association with the ANS is of long standing. He became an Associate member in 1953, was elected a Fellow in 1955, and a Life Fellow in 1964. From 1963 to 1983 he served as a Council member and from 1965 to 1983 as Chairman of the Publication Committee. In 1975 he was named a Benefactor of the Society.

"But perhaps his most important contribution to numismatic knowledge is his ability to teach others D his generosity in sharing and disseminating the fruit of his labor is well remembered by those who have had the privilege of his mentorship.

"It is in view of his many significant accomplishments in furthering the science of numismatics that it gives the American Numismatic Society great pleasure to award this year's Archer M. Huntington Medal Award to Professor Theodore V. Buttrey, Jr."

Professor Buttrey expressed his deep appreciation for the award which he characterized as the "top honor in the field." Recalling the number of times that he, as a member of the Society and its Council, has been present at previous Huntington Award ceremonies, he noted that perhaps Otto M¿rkholm, recipient in 1981, had best expressed the feelings of honorees when he said that he had "looked through the list of previous recipients and marveled at them and wondered what he was doing in this place and decided, 'Why not?'"

Stating that he had first set foot in the ANS some 45 years ago, and since had never been away for very long, Buttrey expressed his admiration for the Society's collections, library, and personnel that together make possible the work of scholars which, in turn, the ANS finds worthy of recognition. Finally, he noted that he was accepting the award "as a measure not of what I have done but of things to come; a reminder of what is yet to be completed," referring to the projects cited by Mark Salton as in progress. Buttrey concluded "If I fail in that, you may have the medal back!"

Following his acceptance of the award medal, Buttrey (introduced by his former student, now Chief Curator of the ANS, William E. Metcalf), discussed the problem of "Western American Gold Bars," which he identified as a series of closely related ingots produced in the names of western mines and assayers and mostly purporting to originate in California and to date from the 1850s and 1860s, the days of the gold rush. Buttrey asserted that historical evidence supporting their origin is lacking and his research indicates that the bars themselves were unknown before the 1950s.

The J. Sanford Saltus Medal Award


On February 17, a day after one of the winter's seemingly endless series of snowstorms, a large number of friends of the medal made their way to the ANS for the award of the J. Sanford Saltus Medal to Nicola Moss, an English artist. Moss, who spent a year in Minnesota in 1995, has many friends among American medalists and they joined with Society members and the public to applaud her as she received the Society's prestigious J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal.

The award was presented by ANS Curator of Medals Alan M. Stahl, representing the Saltus Award Committee Chairman Robert Weinman. The citation reads:

"The J. Sanford Saltus Award is given for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal. Usually, this has been interpreted as lifetime achievement and given to an artist for a significant body of work produced over a span of decades. It is one of Nicola Moss's most striking achievements that she has created a body of work which is varied, innovative, and of the highest quality in a relatively short time period.

"Born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1960, Moss has been in the forefront of contemporary medallic art since her participation at the International Medallic Workshop at Pennsylvania State University in 1984. Her medal of George and the Dragon of 1986 graced the cover of that year's issue of The Medal, which featured an article on her work by British Museum curator Philip Attwood. Her 1989 medal of Charles Darwin for the Society of Medalists was the first medal in this 62-year- old series made by an artist who was not an American. Recent medals have been commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and the National Arts Collection Fund, both in London, the Negishi Equine Museum in Yokohama, and the College of Architecture, University of Minnesota.

"The outstanding aspect of her work is the adaptation of age-old subjects and motifs into forms which are at once personal, modern, and evocative of traditional artifacts. Coins figure prominently in her repertoire of archetypes, as in the Siculo- Punic motif horse's head which graces the obverse of her 1990 Yokohama medal, whose reverse recalls Western hallmarks and Eastern calligraphy, integrated by an equine theme and a textured relief taken from a leather saddle. Her 1992 Green Man medal uses the fabric and technique of archaic Greek coinage to celebrate a figure of regeneration common to northern European traditional cultures.

"Medieval Christianity infuses her medal for the Company of Goldsmiths, with its symbolic evocation of their patron, the tenth-century Saint Dunstan, a goldsmith in his own right. Her medal for the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture of the University of Minnesota is inspired by the Native American legend of the creation of Turtle Island, the North American continent.

"Even medals of classical subject matter receive a thoroughly imaginative treatment in Moss's hands, as exemplified by her 1986 George and the Dragon medal, which contrasts the heroically ineffectual knight on the obverse with an impatient and non- dependent maiden on the reverse; the free-flowing contour and use of carved marble for relief gives an added element of drama to the piece. The innovative combination of techniques also infuses her Charles Darwin medal. The obverse, derived from a clay model, gives the great paleontologist the look of a fossil himself, while the reverse tortoise, carved in intaglio into plaster, emerges very much alive.

"If the signal achievement of Nicola d'Alton Moss has developed in a relatively brief period, it is none-the-less a radiant and luminous beacon, for which we have selected her as the 1996 recipient of the J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal."

In accepting the award medal, Moss gave the audience an overview of her approach to medallic creation, which draws strongly on personal experiences and imagery.

Among Moss's longtime admirers in attendance was the featured speaker at the meeting, Philip Attwood, of the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum. Attwood's talk was entitled "An Art and an Industry: Medal Making in Britain in the 19th Century." In this original and stimulating presentation, he traced the emergence of a thriving medallic industry in Victorian England, especially in Birmingham. He touched on issues of interest to all in the audience, which included makers, collectors, scholars, and admirers of the medal.

The meeting was accompanied by the opening of two exhibits in the Society's East Hall. "Nicola Moss, a Retrospective" featured an extensive display of the Saltus Award recipient's work, mostly on loan from her own collection. Among pieces of special interest were a large cast version of the artist's portrait of Charles Darwin, which was adapted for her popular medal for the Society of Medallists; a setting of her Saint Dunstan Millennium medal in an oak casket; and a series of medals done jointly with her husband Simon Beeson which draw on their experiences with ice fishing in Minnesota. The other exhibit, "The English Medal," was curated by ANS Curator of Medals Alan Stahl and installed by Curatorial Assistant Elena Stolyarik. It was based on the Society's strong holdings of English medals and decorations, supplemented with important loans from the collections of Mark and Lottie Salton and Jonathan Kagan. Among the interesting pieces on display were the medal made for Lord Baltimore, one of the earliest with an American connection, and the insignia from the Garter King at Arms, one of the rarest of the Society's holdings of English orders.

A new feature was introduced into the proceedings with a workshop for medalists given by Nicola Moss before the formal meeting, an event sponsored by the American Medallic Sculpture Association. The day ended on a traditional note, with many of the assembled group continuing the festivities at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village.

The Graduate Fellowship


The Graduate Fellowship for 1996/7 has been awarded to Eleonora Luciano of Indian University, who is writing a dissertation on Italian Renaissance medals of women from Cecilia Gonzagao to Isabella d'Este. Luciano was a student in the 1995 Graduate Seminar.

The Graduate Fellowship is restricted to alumni of the Graduate Seminar and carries a stipend of $3,500.

The Frances M. Schwartz Fellowship


The Frances M. Schwartz Fellowship for 1996/7 has been awarded to Diana Whitecage of Bennington College. She worked at the ANS in January and February under our arrangement with Bennington College and was a most efficient and congenial assistant.

The Swartz Fellowship was established in 1985 in memory of a longtime volunteer at the museum who died in 1984.

The Shaykh Hamad Fellowship


As a result of a generous gift from Shaykh Hamad Abdullah M. Al-
Thani, a Gold Circle member of the ANS, the Society was able to offer the first Hamad Fellowship in Islamic Numismatics for 1996/
7 in the amount of $3,000. The first Hamad Fellow is Dr. Parvaneh Pourshariati, a Fordham University lecturer and recent Ph.D. from Columbia where she produced a thesis on the Khurasanian city of Tus in the late Sasanian and early Islamic period.

The Donald Groves Fund

Through the Donald Groves Fund the Society seeks to promote research and publication in the field of early American numismatics involving material dated no later than 1800. Funding is available for travel and other expenses in association with research as well as publication costs.

Applications for support should be addressed to the Secretary of the Society and should include an outline of the proposed research project, the method of accomplishing the research, funding requested, and the specific uses to which the funding will be put. Applications will also be considered for publication support for manuscripts on topics meeting the Fund's criteria. Applications are reviewed periodically by the Donald Groves Fund Committee which reports its recommendations to the Society's Council.

Coinage of the Americas Conference

Each year the Society's Standing Committee on COAC organizes a conference on a particular topic devoted to the money of the Americas. One of the lasting benefits of the annual COAC, begun in 1984, lies in the effort made by the committee and the annual conference chairman to concentrate the talents and energies of many individuals on the conference program and its resultant publication. COAC has come to assure both a focus of intellectual interest on specific problems and a record of the latest scholarship in these areas of monetary history.

While the COAC forum has remained constant over the course of the past decade, the format has been adapted in many cases to the needs and opportunities presented by individual topics. The period of the conference has ranged from three days to one, with the one-day concentrated program being the current format. In 1987, the COAC theme was "The Medal in America," presented in three sessions, each chaired by a different moderator, and accompanied by a scholarly exhibition, "The Beaux-Arts Medal in America," curated by Barbara A. Baxter who also prepared the illustrated interpretive catalogue published for the occasion. Two of the past ten conferences have focussed on subjects beyond the United States, "The Coinage of El Peru" in 1988 and "Canada's Money" in 1992. The remaining conferences to date have dealt with U.S. Colonial and Federal numismatic topics covering coinage by metal, paper money, medals, and tokens. The opening of the second decade of COAC was ushered in by further specificity of topics as the 1995 program discussed "Coinage of the American Confederation Period," a short but extremely active era in American numismatic history. The 1996 conference, on "America's Large Cent," focused on another brief but numismatically intense period.

From the outset, each year's program has been developed and superintended by a committee and a conference chairman. In the early years the committee was selected ad hoc. In 1992, recognizing the need for long term continuity in planning for conferences several years in advance, ANS President R. Henry Norweb, Jr., appointed a COAC Standing Committee with Donald G. Partrick as Chairman. Each COAC continues to have a Conference Chairman whose responsibilities include moderating the proceedings and the discussions engendered by presentations and editing the papers for publication.

To date, COAC Proceedings volumes have earned two awards. In 1991, the Lewis M. Reagan Memorial Foundation, through the Professional Numismatists Guild, presented its Robert Friedberg Award to the ANS for the "outstanding series on Coinages of the Americas," noting in particular America's Gold Coinage, edited by William E. Metcalf, published in 1990. In 1995, the Canadian Numismatic Research Council conveyed its Fred Bowman Numismatic research Award on the ANS "in recognition of their well-
researched work on a Canadian numismatic subject entitled Canada's Money, edited by John M. Kleeberg," published in 1994.

Conference Summary
COAC 12 (1996):
 "America's Large Cent", Del N. Bland and John M. Kleeberg, Conference Co-Chairmen.

PROGRAM:
 James Neiswinter, "Joseph N. T. Levick and the 1793 Cents."
R. W. Julian, "Aspects of the Early Copper Coinage, 1793-1796."
John M. Kleeberg, "The Strawberry Leaf Cent: A Reappraisal."
John Wright, "The Hiatus."
Craig Sholley, "Early U.S. Coinage Dies in the ANS Collection."
Steven K. Ellsworth and Christopher B. Schwerdt, "The Butternut Hoard."
Denis W. Loring, "An Overview of Proof Large Cents."
Mark Borckardt, "Restriking the Issues: the Large Cent Restrikes of 1804, 1810, and 1823."

EXHIBITORS:
 Mark Borckardt; Colonel Steven K. Ellsworth; James Neiswinter; the ANS ("Unusual Cents from the ANS Collection" and "Medals from the Early U.S. Mint").

PUBLICATION:
 Del N. Bland and John M. Kleeberg, eds., America's Large Cent (1997), in preparation.

ANS COAC STANDING COMMITTEE:
 Donald G. Partrick, Chairman; Richard G. Doty; David L. Ganz; Howard W. Herz; John M. Kleeberg; Allen F. Lovejoy; Philip L. Mossman; Eric P. Newman; Anthony J. Terranova; Leslie A. Elam, Conference Coordinator.

PUBLIC LECTURES

The one-hundred and thirty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Society took place on Saturday, October 14, 1995. The Librarian and Curators reported on the year's notable acquisitions.

On January 20, 1996, the David M. Bullowa Memorial Meeting took place, the sixth annual meeting in which three Graduate Seminar students addressed the membership. Michael Smith, Brown University, spoke on "The Coinage of 'Lete'"; Rachael Koopmans, University of Notre Dame, addressed "Crime and Punishment: Canterbury Moneyers and the Recoinage of 1180"; and Judith Nolan, New York University, discussed "The Lubeck Florin and Hanseatic Trade."

On February 17, Nicola Moss was the recipient of this year's J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal. Dr. Philip Attwood of the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum spoke on "An Art and an Industry: Medal Making in Britain in the 19th Century." There were two special exhibits mounted for the occasion. One was "Nicola Moss, a Retrospective" featuring the artist's works. The other was "The English Medal," highlighting items from the strong holdings of the Society. The American Medallic Sculpture Association sponsored a morning workshop for medalists.

The third annual "Day of the Etruscans" took place on February 24. Professor Richard DePuma of the University of Iowa spoke on "Etruscan Forgeries." This event is co-sponsored by the Etruscan Foundation which has its headquarters in Detroit.

Theodore V. Buttrey, Jr., was the recipient of this year's Huntington Medal Award. After Mark Salton, Chairman of the Huntington Medal Award Committee, read the citation, Professor Buttrey spoke on "Western American Gold Bars."

The 1996 Joseph B. and Morton M. Stack Memorial Lecture was delivered by Elizabeth Nuxull on April 13. The title of her address was "The Robert Morris Papers."