Hoarding in Roman Britain

Abstract

Chapter 3 presents an overview of the nature of the hoard evidence from Roman Britain, based on the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded joint British Museum and Leicester University research project, titled Crisis or continuity: Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain with special reference to the third century AD. The project, led by Roger Bland, has collected data on all Iron Age and Roman coin hoards found in Britain to understand their archaeological context and the changing nature of hoard deposition during this period. Analysing numismatic data alongside information on the archaeological and landscape context of coin hoards allows this material to be reintegrated into wider social and archaeological narratives for Roman Britain and studied alongside the large data set of single finds held by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This approach also highlights a number of methodological issues in the interpretation and definition of coin hoards.