Britain's Secret Treasures

by Mary-Ann Ochota

  www.museumwales.ac.uk

  On a November day in 2002, Gary Mapps was metal detecting in a field outside Abergavenny. He got a signal, and made the find of a lifetime. This copper-alloy drinking vessel, with an evocative leopard-shaped handle, is one of the finest Roman artefacts ever to be found in Wales.

  Context is everything

  Gary immediately informed the PAS at the National Museum Wales about his star find, and they were able to thoroughly excavate the site, gathering crucial evidence about how and why the cup was deposited. Because it isn’t gold or silver, Gary had no legal obligation to inform the archaeologists or museum service about his discovery, but because he did, our understanding is so much richer.

  The excavation revealed that the cup had been placed upside down in a small pit containing a human cremation burial with pottery and burnt bone, within a bigger Roman cemetery, beside a major road. It’s close to the mid 1st- to early 2nd-century (50–130AD) fort at Abergavenny (Roman Gobannium), and would have been a prized possession of a Roman soldier or early visitor to the newly conquered province of Britannia, or perhaps a native Briton who was given the cup as a gift.

  This area of Wales had a significant Roman presence, despite the fact that further west the native tribespeople put up a fierce and successful resistance to these new invaders. Many local people collaborated with the Romans, combining elements of Roman lifestyle and art with their own traditional beliefs and practices.

  One of the new, popular introductions was wine, giving the natives a new alcoholic option in addition to the mead, beer and grain and fruit spirits they were familiar with. The Romans associated leopards with the God of Wine, Bacchus, so the beautiful handle is a fitting decoration on a drinking cup.

  Leopards were also captured and traded out of Africa and Asia, prized as fighting beasts for shows in arenas and amphitheatres across the Roman Empire, although it’s quite possible that the owner of the cup had never seen a real leopard. The cup was almost certainly made in Italy in the 1st century AD, and brought to Britain after the conquest in 43AD. Very similar cups have been found in Pompeii, the Roman city that was destroyed and preserved by a volcanic eruption in 79AD.

  The craftsmanship of the cup is exquisite – leaded bronze (copper, tin and lead) was cast in a mould, and then turned on a lathe to achieve the smooth, even, finished look. The leopard handle was cast separately and then finely finished with silver inlay for its spots and probably amber inlay for its eyes.

  Roman burial practices

  It’s been suggested by some scholars that death for Romans in the 1st century AD was considered to be a definitive end to existence, where the deceased person’s spirit would travel to the underworld and that would be it. Following the correct burial rituals would ensure that the person’s spirit would successfully depart and not linger on Earth, becoming a danger to the living. The details of these beliefs are hard to pin down in the records. The idea of an eternal, potentially positive, afterlife was slowly introduced from eastern cults, including Christianity, but only became mainstream in the early 300s AD.

  Cremations like the one associated with the Leopard Cup would have been performed away from the cemetery, and then the ashes were scooped into a container of some kind and buried or placed in a tomb or cist (pronounced ‘kist’ like ‘crisp’, a stone-lined pit) in a marked cemetery. Some inhumations (burial of the body) were also performed – there appears to be regional variation in the common practices. In both cremations and burials, however, archaeologists often find items related to drinking – flagons, flasks, cups and bottles. And just like the Leopard Cup, many are upside down in the grave. Some very bizarre burials also have narrow pipes inserted into them from the surface, potentially so that living relatives could continue to provide drinks, libations, to the deceased.

  “Cremations like the one associated with the Leopard Cup would have been performed away from the cemetery”

  We can’t be sure whether people thought that the dead person needed cups and bottles of drink to help them on their journey to the underworld or afterlife, or whether the drinks were intended to pacify malign spirits and keep them away from the living. The alternative is that personal items might have been considered unlucky once their original owners died, so burying them was a way of safely disposing of them. The last option is that it simply became custom to bury something precious with the dead, more as a tribute and memorial, than as a necessity for the afterlife.

  The Leopard Cup is now proudly displayed at Amgueddfa Cymru, the Welsh National Museum in Cardif for the admiration and debate to continue.

  See also:

  Staffordshire Moorlands Ilam Pan

  Ringlemere Cup

  Frome Hoard

  An enormous Roman pot holding a record-breaking 52,503 coins

  Date: Around 290AD, Roman

  Where, when and how found: Frome, Somerset; 2010; metal detecting

  Finder: Dave Crisp

  Official valuation: £320,250

  Where is it now? Museum of Somerset, Taunton

  www.somerset.gov.uk/museums

  Dave Crisp has been metal detecting since the 1980s, and has reported more than 300 finds to his local Finds Liaison Officer. In 2009, he discovered a rare hoard of Roman silver siliqua coins buried in a farmer’s field – for many detectorists, this would be a find of a lifetime. But the following year, in April 2010, Dave returned to the area to search the field again. He got a signal from his metal detector, and tentatively dug into the earth. Below the surface, he hit some small pottery sherds and a few bronze Roman coins. Dave realised he might have found a hoard – another find of a lifetime! With utter self-control, he stopped digging, marked the position, refilled the hole and called in the archaeologists – he didn’t want any information about the context of the hoard to be lost by disturbing more than he had to.

  Three-day excavation

  A local archaeologist, Alan Graham, was quickly brought in to excavate the find site. Together with the Finds Liaison Officers, the landowner’s family, friends and Dave himself, he began to carefully dig and record the data he collected. The small sherds that Dave had initially discovered turned out not to be the actual container, but a small upturned dish that had been used as a makeshift lid for a much, much bigger vessel beneath. As Alan and his team of excited helpers began to dig out the thick clay around the pot’s sides, they realised just how huge it was: 60cm tall and 45cm wide, the grey-ware Roman storage jar was stuffed full of bronze coins. It was a monster, weighing more than 160kg.

  “The grey-ware Roman storage jar was stuffed full of bronze coins. It was a monster, weighing more than 160kg”

  There was no way the pot would come out of the ground whole, with the coins in situ. It seemed clear that the pot couldn’t have originally been put into the hole full either, but carefully positioned and then filled. Otherwise the sheer weight of the coinage inside would have cracked it instantly.

  When people discover hoards and dig them out themselves, information about the way the coins were deposited inside the vessel, and in what order, is invariably lost. Because Dave had stopped digging when he did, the coins were in situ and could be precisely recorded. In order to gather as much data as possible, the team decided to systematically dismantle the pot from the top down following the existing cracks in the pottery, and record the coins in ten layers, immediately bagging and labelling them.

  Conservation of the monster hoard

  Before they could be analysed, the coins needed to be cleaned by specialists. Finds are often left to dry naturally, but because the Frome Hoard had been waterlogged in the ground, the coins were carefully washed first, to prevent corrosion from solidifying on their surfaces. It took eight weeks for the staff at the British Museum to wash, dry and count the coins. In total, there were an astonishing, and record-breaking, 52,498 bronze radiate coins and five silver denarius coins – 52,503 in total. This is the biggest hoard ever found in one container.

  Thirty-thousand
of the coins needed further painstaking conservation, and about 15% of the hoard were so corroded that they were initially entirely illegible. Conservators had to prioritise cleaning just the identifying features on each coin, so that they could be catalogued. On the diagram, see here, the corrosion over the nose and eyes hasn’t been removed, as enough information has already been revealed to identify the coin.

  It took ten further weeks for the team to sort the coins by emperor and date. Now they knew where each dated coin came from inside the pot, and patterns started to emerge.

  Patterns in the pot

  The earliest coins were from around 253AD, the latest were from around 290AD. All of the latest coins were deposited in the middle of the pot. So the pot wasn’t filled slowly over forty years with a series of coin deposits that went from oldest at the bottom to newest at the top. Rather, it seems to have been filled all at once. But not from one source – one group of early coins from Emperor Carausius’ reign (286–293AD) are at the top of the pot, while later Carausian coins are in the middle. In normal circulation, all your coins would get mixed together. For groups of coins from different dates to stay distinct, it suggests they were kept in smaller pots and bags, or brought in by different people, and only tipped into the giant pot at the last minute.

  The forgotten British Emperor – Carausius and his coins

  Throughout the later 200s, there were a number of breakaway emperors ruling dominions at the edges of Rome’s control. Britain and Gaul were at one of these frontiers, and a succession of different rulers took power and then fell – a potentially dangerous time for the military and citizens alike.

  One of the men battling for control was Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius, commonly known as Carausius. Despite his allegedly low birth, by 286AD Carausius had risen to the rank of general and was commander of the Roman naval fleet in the North Sea and English Channel, protecting Roman Britain and Roman Gaul from ‘barbarian’ raiders.

  Roman writers from the time claim that in an ‘outrageous act of brigandage’, Carausius intercepted a fleet of barbarians with ships full of stolen loot, but instead of returning the valuables to their owners, he kept the treasures for himself and his troops.

  For this act of treachery, Emperor Maximian in Rome sentenced Carausius to death. Carausius responded by declaring himself Emperor of Britain and northern Gaul.

  Carausius was very keen to prove that he was a legitimate ruler, and the designs on his coins emphasise that – one coin shows the figure of Britannia shaking Carausius by the hand, with a quotation from Virgil, ‘Come, long-awaited one’ (‘Expectate Veni’). Other coins have initials which are likely to stand for another quotation, ‘The Golden Age returns, now a new generation comes down from Heaven above’. Like many leaders throughout history, Carausius knew the propaganda power of coins.

  Carausius’ reign came to an end when he was assassinated by his finance minister, Allectus, in 293AD. We don’t know the details, but Allectus managed to rule for around three years before the whole of Britain was reconquered by Rome.

  In the Frome Hoard there are around 840 Carausian coins, the largest group ever found in Britain, including five incredibly rare silver denarii (singular: denarius). There are no coins from Allectus’ reign. The latest coins come from the middle of Carausius’ reign so it’s likely that the hoard was buried a couple of years before, or around the time of Carausius’ murder.

  HOW TO READ A ROMAN COIN

  by Natalie Mitchell and Ana Tam.

  See more of Natalie and Ana’s work at www.finds.org.uk/blogs/fromehoard/

  The LEGEND is the text on a coin which names the emperor (Augustus and Caesar in Latin) ruling at the time. Other titles include commander (imperator), pious (pius) and blessed (felix).

  The mintmarks give information about where and when a coin was struck and are often recorded in the format shown at the bottom right of the image. They are found on the reverse of the coin in the areas known as the FIELDS and the EXERGUE.

  On this Carausian coin, the letters ‘B’ and ‘E’ are mint control letters in the field of the coin – we don’t know what they stand for, but there was a large issue of coins bearing ‘B E’.

  The ‘MLXXI’ in the exergue stands for:

  ‘Moneta Londiniensis’ (the mint of London) – 1 part silver to 20 parts copper (i.e. 5% silver).

  Pax (the personification of peace, as seen on this coin) was the most common image Carausius used on the reverse of his coins.

  The coin pictured has been conserved to a point where the text has been revealed enough so it can be identified. The portrait of Carausius on the obverse still has his eyes and nose covered by corrosion because these areas are not a research priority.

  The ‘IMP’ that precedes ‘CARAVSIVS’ remains hidden by the crystals of corrosion products, as it’s common to find IMP before the name of the emperor and there isn’t space for much else to fit there.

  However, there are instances where a string of extra letters have been included on coins: ‘IMP C CARAVSIVS’ means Imperial Caesar Carausius, and ‘IMP C M CARAVSIVS’ means Imperial Caesar Mausaeus Carausius. From an inscription on a milestone found near Carlisle, we know that his full name was probably Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius.

  Why did the hoard get deposited?

  Although the Frome Hoard is the largest ever found in a single container, hoards of bronze radiate coins that date from 253–296AD are strangely common in Britain. Over 600 have been discovered, including the Cunetio Hoard, Wiltshire (54,951 coins in two containers), the Normanby Hoard in Lincolnshire (47,912 coins), the Blackmoor Hoard in Hampshire (29,802 coins) and the Chalgrove Hoard in Oxfordshire (4,957 coins) (see here for the Chalgrove Hoard).

  Archaeologists have thought that hoards were deposited at this time because of the military and political instability: in a time before banking or police, the safest place for your valuables may well have been hidden in a hole in a field. But despite the changing emperors, Britain at this time seems to have been relatively peaceful and prosperous. And the Frome Hoard is too big to be easily buried and collected in a hurry.

  Dave Crisp’s find is forcing us to reconsider the very purpose of Roman hoards. Instead of an act of fear, coin hoarding might have been a celebrated ritual. Throughout the Bronze Age and Iron Age, people deposited metal and precious objects in the ground or in water as offerings to gods. Perhaps burying coins was a similar ritual act for people during the Roman occupation.

  The Frome Hoard should be celebrated as a Treasure champion – the story of its discovery, excavation, conservation and display is a shining example of the best ways metal detectorists, land owners and archaeologists can work together to tell the story of our island’s incredible past.

  See also:

  Chalgrove Hoard and Coin of Domitianus

  Hallaton Treasure

  Nesscliffe Ritual Spoons

  Mysterious, hand-sized 2,000-year-old spoons

  Date: 300BC–100AD, Iron Age

  Where, when and how found: Nesscliffe, Shropshire; 2005; metal detecting

  Finder: Trevor Brown

  Where are they now? Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery

  www.shrewsburymuseum.org.uk

  Trevor Brown is a keen and experienced metal detectorist, and in 2005 he made a discovery of international importance. Searching farmland in mid-Shropshire, he got a signal, dug down and discovered these two hand-sized copper alloy spoon-like objects sat one inside another. He took the artefacts to his local Finds Liaison Officer, Peter Reavill who immediately recognised them as a pair of incredibly rare Iron Age spoons. These aren’t ordinary eating or serving spoons, but are likely to have been used for a ritualistic purpose that we can’t yet fully comprehend.

  Although the spoons are made from copper alloy, because they’re prehistoric in date and were found together, they qualify as a ‘base metal prehistoric assemblage’ and were officially declared Treasure. Shropshire Museums were delighted to be able to acquire them;
Trevor and the landowner received the full reward, and the spoons are now on permanent display in Shrewsbury Museum.

  Mystery spoons

  Only twenty-three other Iron Age spoons like this have ever been discovered, and Trevor’s finds were the first for eighty years. Twenty of these spoons have been found in pairs, and it’s thought that the single spoons that have been discovered originally all had a mate that has since been lost. Apart from one pair of spoons discovered in a burial in France, these spoons have only ever been found in Britain and Ireland.

  Both the Nesscliffe spoons are made from a single sheet of copper alloy, hammered into shape over a mould, and they’re similar enough in shape to be able to sit inside one another. Each spoon has a shallow bowl, pointed at one end, and rounder towards the stub handle end. Both handles are plain, although other Iron Age spoons are decorated with different designs on each of the handles. On other paired spoons there’s clear evidence of wear on the stub handles, showing that the spoons have been held between the forefinger and thumb.

  Just like all the other pairs of mysterious spoons, the Nesscliffe pair aren’t identical: one is marked with two engraved lines forming a cross through the centre of the bowl, with a small circle highlighting where the two lines intersect.

  The other spoon is plain, but usually the plain spoon has a perforated hole on one side, towards the rim. In the Nesscliffe spoon, the bowl is torn at the point where we’d expect to see the perforated hole. Most spoon holes are on the left-hand side; the Nesscliffe spoon appears to have had its hole on the right-hand side. When Trevor discovered the spoons, the ‘hole’ spoon was sitting inside the ‘cross’ spoon.