We’re studying around fifty hoards in our project, but how did we choose which ones to focus on? Fortunately, researchers have compiled lists of the hoards that have been found with details about their contents, and the British Museum also has a lot of relevant archive information.
Firstly, we used the issue dates of the coins to select the hoards that belong to the end of the Roman period in Britain. Next, we chose the ones that had a range of objects in them, not just coins, but other types of artefacts as well. Sometimes this included the container that the hoard was buried in. We’re especially interested in these types of hoards because we want to learn more about the wider range of artefacts that were available in the fifth century. It’s also going to be interesting to examine what dates the artefacts have compared to the dates of the coins in the hoard.
It’s important that the objects survive today to be studied at first hand, so the final consideration was the quality of information available. Hoards have been discovered over hundreds of years and not all of them survive intact or have made it into museum collections. Some will have been melted down after discovery, for example. The ones we’ve chosen are relatively well-recorded and survive at least in part in museums around Britain. The largest, from Hoxne in Suffolk (now in the British Museum; see below), contains over 15,000 objects, and the smallest has only a few items. We’ll be telling you more about them in our blog posts over the course of the project.
