More on the Roman Coins in Peter Wenham’s Collection – Riccardo Caravello
Riccardo Caravello’s British Numismatic Society internship has had him examining fascinating coins at York Museums Trust (YMT) and the York Archaeological Trust (YAT). You can read more about his initial work here.
When I came back to Peter Wenham’s coins after 2 weeks spent in the YAT store it was to try to determine what the coins could tell us.
I examined coins from Trentholme Drive and those in Bishophill area. The former was outside the Colonia, the Roman civilian settlement in York, and the latter were outside it. To better understand the coins I needed to know something about their stratigraphy, as well as some details about the sites where they were found.
Using the bibliography available I started to go deeper into the archaeological context of the coins. Trentholme drive was a major Romano-British Cemetery, located alongside the York-Tadcaster road outside Micklegate Bar. Both burials and cremations are both documented there. In order to get an overall view I considered the denominations and the periods of issue of coins at both sites. At Trentholme drive, most coins were from the first to third century with the most common denomination being the as. This was the lowest value coin of the period.
One of the most interesting thing was to find out that a large part of these early coins were associated with skeletons. Wenham in his report says that some of the coins were found in the mouth of the skeletons. This is more common in the early Roman period, when presumably the funerary ritual of leaving coins with the dead was more common. That gave us the idea to recover the skeletons from the Museum Store and to try to display the ritual putting skulls and coins back together. To do that we spent one morning in the Museum Store trying to recover the human remains we needed but with no results because the research would have taken a long time. I found really exciting visiting the Museum Store even because we could have a look at the Wenham paper archive; his excavations journals, mail and amazing pictures of him and his students at work. That was absolutely brilliant. It would be a great idea to prepare an exhibition about Wenham and his studies in York in the future. Amongst the documents we found the excavation journal of Bishophill and a list of coins found in Bishophill area and that was very useful to identify some of the coins.
As far as Bishophill is concerned I added the coins to the Museum’s database and wrote a brief summary of the site using the published material, and plotted similar graphs as those for Trentholme Drive.
To make this graph I used an Excel spreadsheet which helped me to group the coins according with the Reece period classification. The larger group of coins are from AD 238-260 and 330- 348 AD. The coins from this area of the colonia show an intense activity in terms of using and losing money. We have no evidence of coins before the second quarter of the 3rd century AD but instead we have abundant presence of low value coins in the late third century and during the Constantinian period. These coins testify to the use of coins in daily life in the civilian settlement in York.
It would be valuable to keep on studying the coins from Wenham’s box in order to complete the research job he started. I really enjoyed this full immersion in the coins circulation in Eboracum. The internship was really pleasant and always rich with discoveries. I improved my IT and analysis skills, working in a special environment with very experienced people.