A study led at the Universidade de São Paulo's School of Economics has mapped the monetary circulation of the Roman Republic using traces of nearly four million coins. Drawing chiefly on the Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic Online database, the team organised the material into 24,646 hoards covering 5,167 pairs of minting and discovery sites, turning scattered numismatic records into a quantitative picture of ancient financial geography.
The analysis covers roughly 200 to 27 BCE, a turbulent stretch that includes the civil wars which ended the Republic. By applying methods from regional economics and data science to archaeological evidence, the researchers could follow where money was struck, where it travelled and where it came to rest, revealing that monetary circulation closely tracked the roads, ports and administrative infrastructure the Republic built as it expanded.
The conclusion challenges a purely military reading of Roman power. The authors argue that the consolidation of Roman rule depended not only on conquest but on the economic integration of the territories it absorbed, with coinage acting as both instrument and evidence of that process. For historians and economists alike, the work demonstrates how large archaeological datasets can test longstanding hypotheses about how states hold diverse territories together, a question with obvious resonance well beyond antiquity.