Ellen and Kelly recently visited Dorset Museum and Art Gallery to study the coins and objects from a late Roman hoard found in Dorchester (Dorset) in 1898. 53 silver coins (siliquae) were found alongside two silver spoons and several fragments, though one of the coins has since been lost. The hoard serves as an excellent example of the type of hoards we have chosen to look at during the project.
When we arrived at the museum’s study room, our eyes were immediately drawn to the small cardboard box that the coins are kept in…
Aside from two short articles published in the early 1920s, information about the hoard is limited and the contents have not been studied in detail. Our key objective was to closely examine the wear of the objects and to take the weight of each item to calculate the silver content of the hoard.
Re-examining the coins allowed us to substantially update the original coin catalogue published more than a century ago. The latest coins in the hoard were minted in Milan and issued under the emperor Honorius (395-402). In looking at the design and inscriptions on the coins, Kelly was also able to determine several of the siliquae were possibly irregular and probably contemporary copies. These coins enable us to consider wider questions surrounding the production, supply and demand for coinage in the late Roman period. Most of the coins were also lightly clipped around their edges – a phenomenon that occurred in the later fourth and early-mid fifth centuries.
The spoons in the hoard displayed evidence of typical wear. We know that the owners of the spoons were right-handed based on the worn front-left edges of the spoon bowls. What’s more interesting, though, is the possibility that the spoons were also carefully clipped in a similar way to the siliquae. Ellen and the team will be undertaking further research to determine whether this is the case. The spoon fragments, meanwhile, probably represented a source of silver bullion at the time of their deposition.
We left Dorchester with lots more questions than answers and look forward to comparing the contents of the hoard with the rest of our dataset.
