Three large coin hoards discovered in late Roman-era house

Three large coin hoards from Late Antiquity have been discovered in an ancient Roman settlement in Senon, northeastern France. However, rather than being secretly stored during periods of instability, these files are carefully installed, regularly maintained and accessed.

Senon was an important city for the Mediomatrici tribe and is mentioned in documents after the Roman conquest of Gaul (57 BC). While remains from pre-Roman Gaul have been discovered before, the excavations were too small to draw any conclusions about the extent and nature of the settlement. Excavations revealed the remains of wooden buildings, proving that it was a well-developed settlement from the mid-2nd century BC to the early Roman period.

The excavation also revealed changes in Gallic settlements after the conquest. In the first century AD, urban growth coupled with Roman construction methods led to an explosion in quarrying. The wooden and earthen structures of the Gallic settlements were replaced by stone buildings, and builders turned to local sources of limestone for their supplies. No fewer than 10 quarry pits were found at the site, some as deep as 10 feet. As the city expanded, the quarries were reused. Scientific analysis will determine their exact purpose, but possibilities include use as storage space or toilets.

Reconstructed stone houses and roads were laid out according to typical Roman patterns, and so many remains have survived that they allow archaeologists to map the buildings and their architectural features and thus understand the economic status of their owners. At least three buildings have concrete floors in the living rooms, ondol heating systems, elaborate cellars, ovens and rear courtyards. The people who lived in these houses were wealthy, probably of the commercial class, such as merchants or successful craftsmen.

These coin caches were placed inside large amphora in pits dug within the houses. They lived in different dwellings, but all had the same type of container containing thousands of coins dating from the last quarter of the 3rd century to the first decade of the 4th century.

[T]These deposits should be viewed as… the epitome of complex monetary management, medium- and long-term planning within a household or government, with the ability to make deposits and withdrawals at varying intervals. Preliminary analysis and observations during the excavation do not seem to reveal a hasty concealment: the containers containing these coins were carefully placed in a carefully prepared pit, which was perfectly vertical thanks to the use of flat stones. In two cases, coins were found on the outer surface of the vessels, clearly indicating that they were placed there after the vessels were buried but before the pits were filled with sediment. Finally, the location of the two deposits discovered during the excavation, in what appeared to be an ordinary living room and at a height very close to the contemporary ground (the neck of the vase had to be level with the ground), suggests that their owners still had easy access to them.

All hypotheses will be tested, but there may be a link between these three sub-contemporary numismatic hoards (all buried between AD 280 and 310, according to our current information) and the known military occupation of Senon, as evidenced by fortifications from the same period, located only 150 meters from the excavation area. This highlights the importance of documenting the archaeological context of these numismatic hoards, which will be clarified through post-excavation research in the coming months. Their extraordinary nature lies not in the large number of coins found (some thirty coin hoards have been found in the Meuse department alone), but in the rare ability to record the context of their deposition with such precision. Combating archaeological looting, which strips scientific research and society at large of all context, is a key issue in understanding the motivations behind monetary deposits.