Finds of Roman gold coins in Britain
Project leader: Roger
Bland
Department: Portable Antiquities &
Treasure
Project start: 2002
End date: 2008
External partners:
Xavier Loriot, CNRS, Paris
Project funded by: Marc
Fitch Fund
Description:
Finds of Roman Gold Coins in Britain is a corpus of all
finds of Roman gold coins made in Britain. It is a collaboration
with Dr Xavier Loriot of the CNRS, Paris, who published a
comprehensive study of all single finds of Roman gold coins in Gaul
and Germany in 1990. A second volume, which Dr Loriot edited in
1992, brought together studies of finds of Roman gold coins from
most other countries in western Europe. Britain stood out as one of
the few provinces of the western Roman Empire for which no such
study had been undertaken.
We now have details of some 630 single finds.
Because the dividing line between single finds and hoards is often
a narrow one, this volume will also include details of all hoards
of Roman coins from Britain known to include gold coins. Finds
of Roman Gold Coins in Britain will contain details of some
113 hoards, 42 of which are not in Anne Robertson’s Inventory
of Romano-British Coin Hoards.
The corpus of finds will be published in
geographical order, but in the introduction the information will be
analysed in different ways. A series of distribution maps will
illustrate the chronological differences in the distribution
patterns and compare this with the distribution of silver and
bronze Roman coins, with which there are significant differences.
The volume will also note where coins come from known sites and
will examine patterns of distribution that emerge from this. In
addition, it will also discuss the chronological distribution of
the coins, and compare this with the information from other
provinces.
Publications:
R. Bland, `Gold coins in Roman Britain’,
Minerva 17, 6, (November/December 2006) pp. 47-8
Image:
- Roman coin: Aureus of Nero