The Iron Age to Roman Transition in Britain from the Perspective of Coin Hoards

Iron Age coins are still poorly understood: they combine aspects of money as they have standardized weight and metal composition; they exhibit complex and localized iconography; they are deposited in a careful ways, probably as part of a broad 'sacrificial' economy. This proposal examines this last aspect, focusing on hoards deposited in a time of major cultural change , the late Iron Age ("Celtic") to Roman transition in Britain. This will draw on the combined expertise of Leicester and Oxford in the archaeological interpretation of Iron Age coinage (Leicester), in Roman coinage and hoarding (Oxford), and in developments in Iron Age and early Roman societies (Leicester and Oxford).

There is huge potential to exploit data held by the Ashmolean through The Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire Project and by the Celtic Coin Index (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford). The former will provide the vehicle for gathering and analysing hoard data, the latter, for which a new digital platform is being created, will provide a linked-open-data classification for the coinage to facilitate analysis and data on single finds for comparison. Data will also be drawn from the online database of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

Research to date has not worked across the Iron Age-Roman boundary in Britain, when much obviously changes, but over which there were also surprising continuities of practice and culture.

The thesis will address major historical questions. These include the extent to which hoarding can illuminate:
- the nature of the sacrificial economy in Iron Age societies and its implications for human and cosmological power
- how Roman secular activity, including military activity, supply routes, and bases, roads, and the creation of "civitas capitals" (towns), but also new religious structures in shrines and temples, influenced deposition
- Roman coins operated within a market and monetary economy, probably different to that of the late Iron Age. Are there continuities of practice in coin hoards, as well as differences?
- the extent to which regional preferences persisted throughout the transition
- how hoarding relates to the landscape and archaeological context of single coins, both archaeological and metal detector finds
- the similarities and differences in how Britain and Gaul responded to Roman conquest
- how people now reacted to centralized monetary change within the Roman Empire

Our proposal has an ulterior motive. The institutional base of expertise in Iron-Age Numismatics in Britain is thinner than at any point in our lifetimes. In particular there is a dangerous lack of younger scholars in the field. An underlying objective is to use our combined expertise to train up a potentially key member of the next generation to ensure continuity in the field, the national significance of which is clear from its old appellation, "Ancient British Coinage".