Bland abstract 2008
Roman gold coins found in Britain
The paper draws on a project by the speaker and Xavier Loriot to catalogue all recorded finds of Roman gold coins made in Britain. The corpus stands at 656 single finds and 121 hoards with 2,858 identified coins.
In two volumes published in 1990 and 1992 J-P Callu, Xavier Loriot and an international team of collaborators catalogued single finds of gold coins from most of the western provinces of the Empire (J-P Callu and X Loriot, L’or monnayé II and C Brenot and X Loriot (eds.), L’or monnayé III), but the finds from Britain have not hitherto been studied in detail.
The aggregated summaries of single finds from the western provinces of the Empire provide a unique dataset that gives a picture of the fluctuations of coin loss from the whole of the Roman period. The British study enables Britain to be set in its context in the Roman Empire and shows how rich Britain is in coin finds, particularly since the systematic recording of coin finds by the Portable Antiquities Scheme started in 1997.
Originally the study was just going to cover single finds, but as it became increasingly clear that the distinction between hoards and single finds was blurred hoards were included as well. Traditionally hoards and single finds have been studied separately but recently studies such as Peter Guest and Nick Wells, Iron Age and Roman Coins from Wales (Collection Moneta 66, 2007), have included both types of coin find. The paper will consider how far it is possible to study both types of find together: for example, six of the hoards contain 2,143 coins, 75% of the total number of examples known from hoards, with the consequent risk that the coins in these few hoards will completely skew the data.
The dataset also presents an interesting picture of the date of discovery of gold coins from Britain and its circulation pattern which is quite different from that of lower-value denominations.