Collections Volunteer Stephanie Parkinson has been helping to document archaeological aretfacts with the curatorial team at the Yorkshire Museum. In this blog, she shares her experience of documenting a Roman Hoard from a village in York.

Having volunteered with the Archaeology department of the Yorkshire Museum for over a year (under the extremely helpful guidance of the Assistant Curator of Archaeology, Adam Parker) I had become increasingly confident in identifying and cataloguing all manner of weird and wonderful Roman objects.

From mundane and commonplace spindle whorls to beautiful and elaborate brooches and hair pins, each object I recorded and photographed provided an insight into an ancient culture from which all manner of our modern necessities is derived.

In October, I was given the opportunity to bid farewell to my beloved jet beads and dragonesque brooches, in order to undertake a new project with the Curator of Numismatics Andy Woods, focusing on creating detailed documentation for a hoard of late-Roman bronze coins unearthed in Haxby in August 1993.

Numismatics, (a fancy word for the study of coins, banknotes and medals) was an area of archaeology which I had absolutely no experience with, however never one to pass up a challenge, I was promptly presented with an extremely jumbled looking box of coins. Luckily for me, a catalogue of each coin within the hoard existed.

The contents of the first jar, which are now referred to as Haxby A, had been previously catalogued with a detailed record for each individual coin. Haxby B, on the other hand, was still in a somewhat disordered state – this is where I came in!

Reference books in hand, my first task was to do my own bit of excavating, digging out each coin from its jumbled home and matching it up with the pre-existing Haxby B catalogue. This process in itself took a few days – coin identification is no easy task, but certain elements present on the coin can help to further our understanding of it.

I found it useful to first identify the mintmark, found on the reverse. This tells us where the coin was produced, and can be used as a starting point to then investigate the coin further (see below, mintmark reads ‘SCONST’ indicating the mint of ARLES).

Fortunately, the majority of the coins within the Haxby hoard are in a reasonable state of preservation and their mintmarks can be discerned fairly easily. In instances of poor preservation where the mintmark could not be identified, there are a number of other important features which can help.

These features include obverse field marks (for example A or B) or the lack thereof, identification of the Emperor depicted or what headdress they are wearing, the composition of the legend or even the size of the coin itself.

Scattered amongst genuine coins we also find examples of so-called barbarous coinage – ancient copies which, due to their dubious origins, do not fit so easily into any classification scheme.

Within each mint we see coinage representing the many Emperors of Rome, in addition to the personification of the cities Constantinopolis and Rome (URBS ROMA). Haxby B consists of coins issued by no less than ten Emperors. A legend surrounding the bust on the obverse side of the coin can tell us exactly who the issuing Emperor was, for example ‘DN CONSTANTIVS PF AVG’ tells us that the coin was issued by Constantius II (see below left).

We also find a vast array of reverse legend types, from the commonly found ‘FEL TEMP REPARATIO’ (see below right) to ‘GLORIA EXERTICVS’ and, my personal favourite, ‘VICTORIAE DD NN AVG ET CAE’. These legends are largely symbolic – often consisting of pictorial representations of political motives or personifications of virtues.

The next step was to lay each individual coin in a coin tray labelled with its unique access number. I placed the coins in order by date from earliest (starting with a Third century radiate of Carausius, c.AD 286-293) to latest, then by the mint.

Save for 29 coins dating from the third and early fourth centuries, the vast majority of this collection is comprised of post-reform coinage c.AD 348-355. Once the 300+ coins had been placed into the trays, a sense of order began to emerge.

I then created individual records for each coin on AdLib, a repository of information used by museums to record thousands of artefacts, in order to ensure their accessibility for future research. For each record, I noted the unique features of each coin, useful information for identification and physical qualities such as weight, diameter and state of preservation.

I also described the contents of the reverse legends and identified the issuing Emperor. Once each record was completed, I photographed the obverse and reverse of the individual coins, placing the images with the corresponding record. My task was complete!

The vast array of coinage encountered by Numismatists is astonishing. Each small piece can tell us so much about a culture, ancient but so intrinsically connected with our own. The importance of documenting finds such as these cannot be understated, in order for this information to be easily accessible for generations to come.

I hope that this blog has given you an insight into the processes of object identification and cataloguing, and a better understanding of what goes on behind the scenes at the Yorkshire Museum!

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