Riccardo Caravello our British Numismatic Society Intern has been investigating the coins of Professor Peter Wenham.

The first day of my internship placement with YMT started with a box containing some of the coins found during the archaeological excavations run by the Prof. Peter Wenham in the 1950s and 1960s in different sites of York. The coins were kept in small envelopes with different kind of information written on them. Some of them had the description of the coin with the identification, the date of discovery or the identification number; almost all had a reference showing where they were found.

The aim of the project is to try to understand coin circulation during the Roman period in the area of the colonia. This is the area, south of the river in York, which was the site of civilian settlement after enclosed by the medieval walls.

The first thing I needed to do was to check the material in the box and produce a map of the sites. This was a jump into the story of the city, following Wenham’s excavations. Sometimes the envelopes had letters attached which told us about who worked on the coins 50 years ago. Some of the letters gave us precious information concerning the sites, dates or the stratigraphy.

I started to learn the layout of the Roman York by getting used to the areas of the modern city where the excavations were focused.  Using the archaeological publications written by Wenham and the Museum’s database, we managed to link a large part of the coins to its specific site of provenance and to recover their accession number.

In order to be added to the Museum database, the coins needed to have an accession number; however, some of the coins were labelled with accession numbers already used for some other finds. Finding the right number was extremely stimulating because I had to look at the archaeological publications and try to match the coins with the archaeological context and the stratigraphy.

In this way I was not working just with the coins but I could read my activity as part of an archaeological research started 60 years ago.

Among the sites on the south of the Ouse I picked up the area of Trentholme Drive, which was the first Roman cemetery excavated for a specific archaeological purpose.  The site was dug in 1951-1953 and 1957-1959 and fully published by Wenham, which meant that I could have a list of coins and stratigraphic reference to work on.

Almost all our coins were present on the list, and therefore we had the confirmation that we were working correctly. I could record on the database this first group of coins checking the identification in the amazing reference books available in the Numismatic Office.

Even if the examined site was outside of the colonia, the coins found there allow comparison between the coins left in the death and those coming from the daily life within the civilian settlement.

The second group of coins comes from the area of Bishophill in the colonia, where the excavations were undertaken in the summers of 1961-3 and 1967. The information about these coins caused a few issues. During these years the material from different sites of the same area received different names and dates. An accurate research in the Museum paper archive and the Museum database was necessary in order to figure out which accession number had been used for which site.

The research gave me the opportunity to see how the Museum cataloguing system works and how to get through identification problems. The impression I had was that eventually everything turns up and if not, we have all the means to get as close as we can.

After having numbered the coins I proceeded to photograph them in the Research room of the Museum. That is the last step to complete the documentation and to keep the material available to everyone in the future would need to look for it. I will come back to these coins, working on the identification and the analysis. I am really looking forward to it and I am curious to find out what more the Wenham box will reveal.