The CNBA (Centro Numismático Buenos Aires), founded in 1968, is the largest and most prestigious numismatic society in Argentina, with many fellows not only in Buenos Aires city, but all over the country and abroad. Prof. Damian Salgado is the author of half a dozen books and dozens of papers, mainly on ancient Greek and Roman numismatics. In 2019, he won the Federal Government’s grant for independent researchers to study and classify the Greek and Roman coin collection at the National History Museum, Buenos Aires.
12 Years One-Year Seminar on Numismatics
In 2008, Prof. Salgado was invited by the CONICET, the Federal Argentine Bureau for Scientific Investigation, to lecture a one-year seminar on Ancient and Medieval numismatics, the first of its kind in Latin America. This seminar grew in the following years, incorporating advanced levels, dealing with the whole of monetary history from before the inception of coinage to the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Medieval and Oriental (pre-Islamic Semitic and Iranian; Islamic, Indian and SE Asian, and East Asian) periods, including: numismatic epistemology and methodology, monetary history and the historical and economic context of the issues; monetary systems, metrology, coin attribution, classification, and numismatic research. As students must pass a series of examinations and write an original research paper to pass the seminar, many of such works have also been published as academic papers in various numismatic publications.
From 2015, the seminar, in its five levels, moved to the CNBA, where in April 2020, it was scheduled to enter in its 12th uninterrupted year of continuous activity. However, in last March, Argentine society entered in a very strict confinement to face the impact of the COVID-19 pandemics, which still holds.
From Offline Classes to YouTube
Starting in April, however, Prof. Salgado has created a new YouTube channel (*Numischannel*) to upload his classes, which now may be watched freely on that platform. This year’s seminar covers the numismatics and monetary history of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the mechanization of coin production in the late 16th to early 17th century. The first 7 classes, dealing with the periodization of the extensive time span covered, and with the post-Roman Germanic kingdoms, have been successfully uploaded beginning in April 20. The classes have a length of about one to one and a half hours, and are in (Argentine) Spanish, but as professor Salgado is fluent in 6 languages, his plans for after the end of this course, or the end of the pandemics (whichever comes first), is to upload also short videos dealing with aspects of numismatics and monetary history in other languages such as English, French, Italian, German and Swedish.
Find out more on the website of the CNBA.
Click here to watch the video-classes of Seminar IV.
Here you find an overview of all the numismatic events that were cancelled or postponed due to the pandemic.
