Roman coin, 100-300 AD (Lot 5)

About This Coin

A small copper-alloy coin recovered from the round stone feature on Lot 5 during the Season 11 premiere. Rick Lagina pulled it from the ground with Gary Drayton operating the metal detector, one of three coins the team recovered from the same feature on the same morning, joined later by Jack Begley and by Marty Lagina and Craig Tester after a phone call from the lot. Gary read what he described as a faint female bust on one face. At the laboratory, Emma Culligan's XRF returned copper, silicon, lead, and tin, a profile she described as a strong candidate for a Roman coin, and her database matched the composition to known Roman issues.

Later in the same episode, numismatist Sandy Campbell examined the coin at the Interpretive Centre and confirmed the identification. "It is a Roman coin from probably between 100 and 300 AD, if I am allowed to use AD," Campbell told the team. Asked whether he was definitive on the range, he answered yes. The date range puts the piece in the imperial Roman period, from the late Principate through the Crisis of the Third Century. Roman coins from this era were minted in enormous quantities and stayed in circulation long after production, often turning up in medieval contexts hundreds of years and thousands of miles from their original mint. Campbell observed in a later season that Roman coins were actively traded as currency well into the 1500s across Europe and the New World, including at sites associated with the Knights Templar in Iceland that the team has previously visited.

Three further coins came out of Lot 5 the same day. From the morning search, an older copper-silver piece Campbell later dated to before 100 AD, and a brass piece bearing what the team described as a woven or chain-link pattern, given competing identifications by Emma Culligan as a 13th-century French denier and by Sandy Campbell as possibly 6th to 8th-century Indian. Later that day, with Marty Lagina and Craig Tester now on site, Rick recovered a fourth coin Campbell identified as a 16th-century British Tudor portcullis piece. The cluster fits a wider pattern on Lot 5: a half Roman coin recovered the previous season, a sixth Roman coin attributed in Season 13 to the emperor Claudius II (268 to 270 AD), and additional copper pieces from the same round feature. The lot has no recorded history of habitation.