The first 39 coins were found by metal detectorists who reported the finds without attempting to excavate them. Luxembourg’s National Institute for Archaeological Research (INRA) excavated the find site for four years. The process was so slow because the field was full of unexploded ordnance and munitions from World War II. The archaeologists worked side-by-side with explosives experts from the Luxembourg Army Mine Action Service (SEDAL).
When the excavation was complete and the coins safely recovered, it was the end of 2024. Since then, the coins have been conserved, documented and analyzed. Numismatists compared the hoard to others from the same period found in the Benelux countries and western Germany.
Seventeen of the Holzthum coins were struck between AD 364 and 367 at Nicomedia, the major Roman mint on the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Anatolia. They account for 12.2 percent of the 139 regular coins included in the study’s mint-distribution table; the remaining two pieces are fragmentary plated coins.
That concentration is unusual. According to David Wigg-Wolf, David Weis, and Lynn Stoffel, who published the analysis in Schweizer Münzblätter, the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire database contains no comparable regional hoard with such a strong representation from Nicomedia. […]
Emperor Valentinian I was proclaimed Augustus at Ancyra, modern Ankara, in AD 364. The researchers suggest that eastern solidi could have travelled west with Valentinian and his army as they moved first toward Italy and later into Gaul. The Holzthum coins therefore offer a possible material trace of money moving thousands of kilometres with the machinery of the Roman state.
Coins struck in Constantinople between 383 and 388 A.D., and at Sirmium between 394-395 A.D. may have also have moved west with Roman troops after Theodosius I’s defeat of Eugenius at the Battle of the Frigidus on the border between what are now Italy and Slovenia in 394 A.D. There are three Eugenius coins in the hoard, which are very rare because he only ruled the West for two years.
The two plated coins were also investigated. Researchers identified them as the RESTITVTOR REIPVBLICAE type. One was an ancient imitation, the other has a dark surface that suggests high quantities of solver or tin. Based on the portrait style, one was probably an ancient imitation. Another coin has an unusually dark surface and may contain substantial quantities of silver or tin rather than fine gold, although researchers have not yet carried out the metal analysis required to confirm its composition.
* This article was originally published here
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