Tribal emission or imperial coinage? Ideas about the production and circulation of the so-called AVAVCIA coinages in the Rhineland JORIS AARTS and NICO ROYMANS 1 1. Introduction In Celtic numismatics, a long tradition exists of attributing coin types to tribal groups. This is not without problems, because frequently tribal names - and their reconstructed territory - which are known to us through historical sources are projected back in time to it the distribution maps of speciic coin types. However, these coin types are dated to a much earlier period than the ancient authors wrote about. This approach thus has often led to anachronistic and erroneous ethnic attributions. In fact, the tribal societies of Iron Age Gaul were a luid world, only partly understood by the people who wrote about them and provided us with their names. The last Celtic coinages were much closer in time to (or even contemporaneous with) the literary sources mentioned above. In the case of the Germanus Indutilli L coins (Scheers 216) and the AVAVCIA issues (Scheers 217) the danger of anachronism is almost non-existent, but here the question can be asked whether they must be regarded as tribal issues or imperial coinages, which were more or less actively struck on the initiative of the Roman authorities. The traditional explanation of the appearance of the Late Iron Age bronze coinages in Gaul is the need for small change to accommodate transactions in the context of the market, and are thus linked to the emergence of an early monetary economy. In this paper we will show that this explanation is of limited value in the case of the earliest AVAVCIA coinages, or indeed any other Late Iron Age bronze issues which circulated in Gaul in the second half of the 1 st century BC. A more cultural view shall be explored in this article and it will be shown how anthropological concepts can help us to shed new light on the origin and circulation of the AVAVCIA bronzes. The Lower Rhine area is the most northern (continental) zone where Celtic coins were produced. In the time of the publication of Scheers’ Traité there were not much data available, but in the last few decades, the number of coin inds has grown exponentially through the activities of amateur archaeologists with metal detectors. Good examples are the gold staters of the Eburones (Scheers 31) and the triquetrum coinages, but also the number of AVAVCIA coins (and the number of ind spots) has increased dramatically. In this paper, we shall see how this new data can help us to get a better understanding of the production and circulation of AVAVCIA coins in the Lower Rhine period under the reign of Augustus. 2. Classiication, dating and spatial distribution of the AVAVCIA coinages The AVAVCIA coins were irst described in the Atlas of de la Tour in 1892. 2 He made a basic distinction between coins with (dlT8885-888) and without legend (dlT8868). A irst real typology of the AVAVCIA coinages was made by Simone Scheers in 1977. 3 All coins show four horse’s heads arranged in a circle or cross on the obverse, later developing into a more abstract swastika symbol. A horse is displayed on the reverse, walking to the left or the right. There is a considerable variation in details. Scheers distinguishes three classes. The irst class frequently (but not in all cases) bears the reverse legend which gave the coinages their name: AVAVCIA. The second and third classes are without legend and the main difference between them is that on the former the horse on the reverse walks to the left and in the latter to the right. 4 1 The second author has fond memories of his stay as an MA-student in 1983 at the Catholic University of Louvain, where Simone Scheers introduced him into the world of Celtic numismatics, for which he feels grateful. This study is part of the project ‘Roman Nijmegen: Headquarters and Capital in the Region of the Batavians’, which is inanced by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientiic Research (NWO). 2 H. de la Tour, Atlas de monnaies gauloises (Paris, 1892). Before this AVAVCIA coins already appeared in a catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (E.A. Muret and A. Chabouillet, Catalogue des monnaies gauloises de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1889)). The classiication of de la Tour is still widely used in German publications; additionally, AVAVCIA coins are still being referred to as ‘Aduatuker-prägungen’, an attribution to the tribe of the Aduatuci based on an incorrectly assumed synonymity between AVAVCIA and ADUATUCA. 3 Type Scheers 217. S. Scheers, Traité de Numismatique celtique II: La Gaule Belgique (Annales littéraires de l’université de Besançon 195; Paris, 1997). 4 The question can be asked if it would not be better to see Class III coins as a variant of Class II and not as a separate class, especially when one considers the low number of inds (38 coins, see Fig. 3).