About us
Who we are, our mission, methodology, and the scope of the Apulia Numismatic Database.
ANDcoins is an open-access, bilingual research portal dedicated to the documentation and scholarly study of ancient coinage from Apulia.
Developed at the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, the database brings together numismatic records from museum collections, excavation archives, and published catalogs into a single, citable, machine-readable resource available to researchers, institutions, and the public.
Open access
All records freely available. No registration required for browsing or citing.
Bilingual EN / IT
Full record descriptions and interface available in English and Italian.
Peer-reviewed standards
Methodology aligned with national (ICCD – NU 4.00) and international (Nomisma.org / NUDS) cataloguing standards.
Mission
The mission of ANDcoins is to make ancient Apulian coinage more accessible to scholars, students, museum professionals, and the general public through rigorous, standardised documentation, bilingual presentation, and tools that facilitate both specialist research and broader cultural discovery.
Ancient Apulia was home to a remarkable diversity of minting traditions — Tarentine, Daunian, Peucetian, Messapian, and Italiot — many of which remain poorly integrated into major international databases. ANDcoins addresses this gap by consolidating scattered records and applying consistent scholarly standards across all holdings.
Scope
The database aims to index approximately 3,000 records covering the principal coin types of ancient Apulia and adjacent regions, from the late Archaic period through to the Roman Republican monetary system. Each record includes available physical data, typological classification, mint attribution, and bibliographic references.
Methodology
The descriptive standards follow the national cataloging regulations of the Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation (ICCD), specifically the NU 3.00 catalog record for numismatic assets. This is integrated with the most widely used international descriptive ontology in the numismatic field, Nomisma.org (NUDS – Numismatic Description Standard), as well as with the standards used in the main specialized reference catalogs. Each record is assigned a stable catalog identifier designed for citation in scientific publications. The records are produced collaboratively by the project team and verified against primary bibliographical sources. Provenance and find data are included where documented, with explicit indication of the acquisition context in relation to the 1970 UNESCO Convention. All structured metadata are available for export in CSV format; future developments include publication in JSON-LD and full access to the data as linked data via a SPARQL endpoint, in compliance with the interoperability principles promoted by Nomisma.org.