Three large coins hoard found in late Roman-era homes

Three large coins hoards from Late Antiquity have been discovered in an ancient Roman residential block in Senon, northeastern France. Instead of being secreted during periods of instability, however, these were carefully installed and regularly maintained and accessed.

Senon was an important city of the Mediomatrici tribe, documented in Roman sources after the conquest of Gaul (57 B.C.). While pre-Roman Gallic remains had been found before, the excavations were too small in scale to draw any conclusions about the extent and nature of the settlement. The excavation revealed the remains of timber-framed constructions that proved it was a fully developed settlement from the middle of the 2nd century B.C. to the beginning of the Roman period.

The excavation also revealed how the Gallic settlement changed after the conquest. In the 1st century A.D., the growth of the city coupled with Roman building methods led to an explosion in stone quarrying. The wood and earth structures that characterized the Gallic settlement were overtaken by stone construction, and builders turned to local sources of limestone to supply it. No fewer than 10 quarry pits were found on the site, some as much as 10 feet deep. As the city expanded, the quarry pits were reused. Scientific analysis will determine what exactly they were used for, but possibilities includes as storage spaces or latrines.

The rebuilt stone houses and roads were laid out in a typical Roman pattern, and the survival of so many remains makes it possible for archaeologists map the buildings, their architectural features and therefore the economic status of their owners. At least three buildings had living rooms with concrete floors, hypocaust heating, meticulously designed cellars, ovens and courtyards in the back. The people who lived in these homes were well-off, likely commercial class like merchants or successful artisans.

The coins hoards were placed inside large amphorae in pits dug inside the homes. The were in different dwellings, but they all have in common the same type of container holding thousand pf coins dating from the last quarter of the 3rd century to the first decade of the 4th century.

[T]hese deposits should be seen … as a snapshot of complex monetary management, planned over the medium to long term, within a household or administration, capable of making deposits and withdrawals at various intervals. Initial analysis, observations made during the excavation do not appear to reveal hasty concealment: the vessels containing these coins were carefully placed in well-prepared pits, perfectly vertical thanks to the use of leveling stones. In two cases, the presence of a few coins found stuck to the outer face of the vessel clearly indicates that they were placed there after the vessel had been buried, before the pit was filled with sediment. Finally, the location of the two deposits discovered during the excavation, in apparently ordinary living rooms and at an altitude very close to that of the contemporary ground (the neck of the vases must have been flush with the surface), indicates that they remained easily accessible to their owner.

All hypotheses will be examined, but it is possible that there is a link between these three subcontemporary coin hoards—all buried, according to our current information, between 280 and 310 AD—and the known military occupation at Senon, attested by a fortification dating from the same period and located only 150 meters from the excavated area. This highlights the importance of documenting the archaeological context of these coin hoards, which will be clarified in the coming months through post-excavation studies. Their exceptional nature lies less in the discovery of a large quantity of coins (some thirty coin hoards are known in the Meuse department alone) than in the possibility of documenting their depositional context so precisely, which is rare. The fight against archaeological looting, which deprives scientific research and society as a whole of all this contextual information, is a crucial issue for understanding the motivations behind monetary deposits.

* This article was originally published here