It's all about the Money

Nuclear and atomic physics techniques play an increasingly important role in cultural heritage science, the analysis of historical artifacts to determine age, origin, and provenance for a deeper understanding of ancient cultures and developments. These studies are not only important for liberal art communities, but provide also a unique opportunity to offer non-physics students a better insight, understanding, and appreciation of nuclear physics by hands-on participation in these projects. A new initiative in cultural heritage physics has been developed at the Nuclear Science Laboratory (NSL) at Notre Dame using a variety a of accelerator and non-accelerator based techniques. We will focus on three projects associated with the development of coin and paper money development in the Roman and the early American Empire. These projects utilized a wide variety on analytical techniques available at the NSL and provided new insight into the development of metallurgical and papermaking techniques for manufacturing, while making money. To date, the program has served more than twelve undergraduate students from a wide range of disciplines in generating their first scientific publications. Besides physics and chemistry, students from art history, art conservation, classics,  and medieval history from Notre Dame and other institutions have participated.