Iron Age Europe

Hoards of valued materials, particularly coins, are a common discovery across Iron Age Britain and Europe, and the former Roman Empire. In the past, coin hoards have been studied mostly by numismatists as artefacts largely divorced from their archaeological context, under the guise of monetary and political history. There has been relatively little critical investigation of why Roman coin hoards were buried, why hoards were not recovered, and what information they might provide when studied as a group. Why were so many hoards of Roman coins buried in the 3rd century AD? An Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project sought to address these questions, and this volume represents the findings of that research.

The increased use of metal detectors in recent decades has greatly expanded the number of finds – there are c. 340 Iron Age coin hoards and c. 2600 Roman coin hoards currently recorded across Britain. The contents of hoards are catalogued by British Museum staff as part of the process of recording Treasure finds, and also as part of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, but this rapidly-growing corpus of material has never been systematically investigated from an archaeological perspective.

The project used GIS and contextual analyses to investigate the contents of Iron Age and Roman coin hoards in Britain, their landscape settings and contextual associations, with a particular emphasis on 3rd-century AD hoards; in order to understand the reasons for their deposition and what they can tell us about the Iron Age and Romano-British periods.

The volume should be in print by summer 2019, and advance copies are able to be ordered here:

https://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/iron-age-and-roman-coin-hoards-in-britain.html

The cover page and list of authors will probably change though!