Pett abstract 2008
The Portable Antiquities Database and the Celtic Coin Index
Since April 2003, the Portable Antiquities Scheme database (see www.finds.org.uk) has been published online in full. It now holds records and images for over 350,000 objects discovered by members of the public within the boundaries of England and Wales. These objects range from single coin finds, small and large hoards right up to large assemblages of lithics. As far as the Scheme is aware, it is the largest archaeological database of its kind in existence and it is now the subject of a wide range of funded and unfunded academic research around the World. The database is of great importance to the numismatic community for all study periods of English and Welsh history with perhaps the Roman coinage being best represented with over 70,000 coins recorded. Since early 2007, the incorporation of Oxford University's Celtic Coin Index has increased the corpus of Iron Age coins available to study to around 40,000 examples.
Over the next few months, the database is undergoing extensive development work to bring it into line with more up-to-date resources and to make the user experience more fruitful. The database will be able to produce data on demand in a variety of reusable formats which will be in the vanguard of IT advances and it has been influenced by the work of the American Numismatic Society's Seb Heath and the Pleiades project's Tom Elliot from NYU/UNC.
This paper will attempt to demonstrate how applicable the Scheme's data is to the numismatic community and appraise its audience of the latest advancements that we are pioneering.