![]() They had disappeared from circulation by the end of the 2nd century, by which time the standard of officially produced denarii had fallen significantly below that of these legionary issues. These coins were struck at a far lower silver standard than contemporary denarii and it can be seen from hoards that they circulated in Britain throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The only coins of the Republic are two worn denarii of Marc Antony, struck immediately before the battle at Actium in 31 BC. Other area codes were given to coins recovered during the detecting of off-site spoilheaps (B, C and X), though these groups have been included in the spatial study as their original find-spots can be relatively closely located within the settlement.īack to top Survey and summary (denominations and types) For this reason, Area Q coins (like those from Area A) were included in the chronological discussion but not the spatial analysis of the assemblage. This context extended across the entire excavation and it is not possible to locate most of these coins to particular parts of the site. A further 195 Roman coins were recovered from other machining layers (17000) and allocated to Area Q. They were not included, however, in the spatial study of coin loss as it was not always possible to allocate an unstratified coin to a specific enough area of the settlement. Where these coins could be identified they were included in the chronological analysis of the assemblage. The 1745 coins from the topsoil are allocated with the site code and to Area A (consisting of A1, A2 and A4). Figure 402: Roman coins from Elms Farm compared to the British mean This is more likely to occur on a site that was either seriously disturbed by later activity, or was not deeply stratified (like many Romano-British rural settlements the latter was clearly the case). Figure 402 shows that the coins from topsoil layers are very similar to those from stratified deposits, indicating that the topsoil coins are a representative sample of the total assemblage. At Elms Farm, however, metal-detectors were used at all stages of the excavation and the assemblage is much less likely to be biased towards one period of coinage than another. At Colchester, it was suggested that the machining of certain layers, often those associated with the later Roman period, caused the loss of many of the latest coins and thereby biased the site histograms in favour of earlier coins (Crummy 1987, 5-7). The majority of the coins were found unstratified (59.6%), particularly from the topsoil layers that were usually removed by machine. Further post-excavation work has produced higher coin totals and it should be noted that this report is based on the sample of 2910 coins studied. The coins will be deposited at Colchester Museum and thus are available for further cleaning and study in the future. There was little point weighing the Claudian imitations, for example, because any corrosion products would have been included in their weights. A consequence of this method of cleaning large numbers of coins is, however, that detailed studies of particular coin types are not possible for this assemblage. Not all of the coins were cleaned and, of those that were, not all of their surfaces were necessarily eventually cleaned (revealing a particular area of a coin, such as the exergue or obverse legend, usually enabled the coin to receive as complete an identification as was possible under the circumstances). Of the Roman coins 2,842 were classified as site-finds, while a further 68 were found together as a hoard. The excavations produced 2,910 Roman and 16 post-Roman coins. Preston Heybridge: A Late Iron Age and Roman Settlement, Excavations at Elms Farm 1993-5, Internet Archaeology 40.
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