Roman coinage found at Caistor St Edmund

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: Undergraduate

The proposal for my undergraduate dissertation is to carry out research on the subject of Roman coinage found at Caistor St Edmund and the surrounding area. This will involve the gathering of raw data from the records available, from the PAS database and the Norfolk Historic Environment Record, and using this to establish coin loss patterns in the area. The focus will be on studying variation in coin loss between the intra mural and extra mural area.

I took part in the fieldwork at Caistor St Edmund last summer, an excavation led by Dr Will Bowden (University of Nottingham) and it is this which sparked interest in the archaeology of the area. The coins uncovered in the excavations by the Caistor Roman Project over the last few summers as well as local metal detector and field-walking finds in and around the Roman town in the last two decades will be a main focus, as these make up a large proportion of data which John Davies and Tony Gregory did not have at the time of their 1991 survey. This survey ("Coinage From a Civitas", Britannia 1991) forms the starting point for my own research, which is intended to update the work of Davies and Gregory and further contextualise the picture of coin use and loss at Caistor and its hinterland in light of more recent research.

The main research aim here will be to compare the coin loss pattern within the walls of the town to the area outside, to determine whether these still conform to the British background pattern established by Richard Reece, as Davies and Gregory found in the 1980's. The principal question I will address is whether the newer coin data will continue to display this "town site" / "countryside" split or whether recent excavation and detector finds will challenge the existing framework.

Audit data

• Created: 10 years ago
• Created by: D P
• Updated: 9 years ago
• Updated by: R W