Found a perfectly intact Roman coin in the mud during a dig near York last Tuesday.

I was about to call it a day when my trowel hit something solid and I pulled out this little bronze coin of Constantine I, completely making up for the three weeks we'd spent only finding pottery shards and animal bones.

4 comments

4 Comments

susansingh1mo ago

Read somewhere that Constantine coins like that were part of a big reform he did, standardizing the bronze stuff across the empire... I guess that's why they show up all over Britain but still feel so personal when you actually find one. Makes you wonder if the guy who dropped it was grumbling about the new currency rules or just going about his day.

karenb972mo ago

My buddy Mike found a Roman coin in a field in Suffolk last year, a silver denarius just sitting in a plow line. He said his hands were shaking so bad he almost dropped it back in the dirt. That thing had traveled, kind of like what moore.beth said, maybe from a merchant who lost his pocket change a thousand miles from home. It's wild to hold something that old and wonder about the last person who touched it, way better than just another piece of broken pot.

moore.beth2mo ago

Read somewhere that coins traveled way farther than people back then. Maybe it got dropped by a soldier or a trader passing through. That kind of personal find beats pottery shards any day.

davidkim2mo ago

Saw a documentary where they said finding a single coin like that can rewrite the local history. Must have been a crazy rush to pull that out of the mud.