ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which scholarship on late Roman coins in India and Sri Lanka has implicitly and explicitly privileged commercial narratives and economic spaces in its explanations for their presence and use in the subcontinent. It discusses from an economic perspective the spatial context in which many of these coins have been found. The chapter highlights the non-economic distribution of such coins and suggests alternative interpretations for the same. Coins are one of the most powerful archaeological traces of past movements of objects precisely because they are portable and durable: they cross space often without being transformed or annihilated by it, in the way that people or organic products may be. The Roman Empire at the start of this in-between period encircled the Mediterranean, east and west, controlled the routes through Egypt to the Red Sea and thence, to the Indian Ocean, and abutted the Sasanian Persian Empire in the east.
